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Science

First Pterosaur Embryo Fossil Discovered 35

Posted by timothy from the sounds-like-an-omelet dept.
blamanj writes "A fossil embryo, preserved in an almost complete egg was found in the sediment of a lake in Liaoning in northeastern China. The Liaoning embryo has a wingspan of 10.6 inches, indicating that the embryo would have grown up into a medium-to-large pterosaur."
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First Pterosaur Embryo Fossil Discovered More

First Pterosaur Embryo Fossil Discovered

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  • medium to large (Score:5, Funny)

    by pizza_milkshake ( 580452 ) on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @05:21PM (#9382285)
    it also would have made one hell of an omellete.

  • Dinosaurs Among Us? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ieshan ( 409693 ) <<ieshan> <at> <gmail.com>> on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @05:24PM (#9382311) Homepage Journal
    Interested parties might want to check out the following article from Avian Visual Cognition: Dinosaurs Among Us? [tufts.edu]

    This article is a discussion of avian evolution from an avian physiology expert and the possible "bird-dinosaur" connection.

    Very interesting stuff.

  • bird-dinosaur link (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Assuming birds are the ancestors of dinosaurs, does anyone here know why the would have been better able to survive the extinction event 65m years ago? I don't imagine they would be able to fly high enough to avoid the dust cover that enveloped the earth.
    • I think you have it backwards there, friend. Assume dinosaurs are the ancestors of birds.
    • Flight allows the animal to increase it's range greatly, more range = more available food sources.

      At a time when food is scarce, small winged animals who don't need much food have a distinct advantage over huge behemoths who eat a truckload with every mouthfull.

      Remember - bigger != better.
    • well the problem with determining how birds would have survived the extinction event is that there is no really compelling evidence that exctinction was caused by a meteor as the mainstream media implies. We have to know what caused extinction before we find out how they survived it.

      My vote is on toxins produced by angiosperms (flowering plants) killing off all the large plant eating mammals and overbalancing the ecology.

      • Re:bird-dinosaur link (Score:4, Informative)

        by barawn ( 25691 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:08AM (#9386549) Homepage
        no really compelling evidence that exctinction was caused by a meteor as the mainstream media implies.

        Barring the really gigantic impact crater in the south of Mexico [arizona.edu]?

        After the Chicxulub crater was found (oddly enough - with a dating of 65 million years) most scientists were pretty convinced that an asteroid (10 km is not a meteorite) killed off the dinosaurs. There may have been other contributing effects, but a 10 km object slamming into the Earth would have done extremely bad things to the planet's biosphere.
        • The evidence suggests that all life would have died off not just the big reptiles. The meteor theory gives no compelling explaination as to why some things survived and others didn't, and why those particular survivors?
          • The evidence suggests that all life would have died off not just the big reptiles.

            Woah, it wasn't that big of an impact! It's only a 10 km impact on an object that's 40,000 km around.

            Read the link I posted - the impact itself would've caused large tsunamis, and may have killed off an entire generation of plant life, but their seeds would likely have survived (inert) and begun to grow when sunlight fell on them again.

            The meteor theory gives no compelling explaination as to why some things survived and
    • I think a more promising line of attack is to look at what mammals and birds have in common to let them survive what the dinosaurs didn't.
    • FEATHERS?

      After all- the main problem with the dust cover, in theory, is the nuclear winter scenario- plunging temperatures. Insulative feathers would better allow birds to survive than non-flying species.
    • Assuming birds are the ancestors of dinosaurs

      s/ancestors/descendants/, I'm assuming.

      does anyone here know why the would have been better able to survive the extinction event 65m years ago?

      Well, they probably didn't survive. They likely died in massive numers, just like everything else, because there was nothing for them to feed on.

      The difference is that smaller dinosaurs wouldn't've gone extinct - there were so many of them that even with their population going down by a few orders of magnitude, the
    • Assuming birds are the ancestors of dinosaurs, does anyone here know why the would have been better able to survive the extinction event 65m years ago? I don't imagine they would be able to fly high enough to avoid the dust cover that enveloped the earth.

      Nope. They would have been char-grilled if they had been flying. The re-entering material thrown up by the initial impact would have turned the entire sky red hot for a few hours over the entire world.

      The survivors would have been those well-insulate

  • The Liaoning embryo has a wingspan of 10.6 inches, indicating that the embryo would have grown up into a medium-to-large pterosaur.
    While I agree that this is one possible conclusion, is there anywhere where it has evidence as to what stage of embryonic development this dinosaur is currently at? For instance, at varying stages of embryonic development, a human fetus has gills, fins, and wings. Someone viewing a gilled human fetus might even go as far as to mis-classify it. My question is, how sure are we that this is actually the dinosaur we think it is, and not some later evolutionary descendent?
    • Can you provide a source or reference? It's news to me that a human foetus has gills, fins and wings at any stage of development.

    • RTFAA, smartass (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "It is bigger than fossils of hatched pterosaurs, which suggests it probably would have hatched soon."

    • Bad embryology (Score:5, Informative)

      by yet another coward ( 510 ) <yacoward@NoSPAM.yahoo.com> on Wednesday June 09, 2004 @07:38PM (#9383186)
      Maybe you are joking.

      Humans have gill slits, not gills, and limb buds, not fins or wings. The old saying is "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." It is not exactly true, though. The embryology of humans resembles that of many mammals. It resembles fish embryology, too, but not for as long. We share similar adult body patterns and similar patterning genes to many animals, and our early embryology can looks similar. It is not as if we grow to be fish really early and then keep going since we are more evolved than fish.
    • Wings? I knew about the gills and fins (and tail, you missed tail) but I've NEVER seen anything showing that any primate went through a flight stage.
  • Interesting thought - the development of dinosaurs has not really been studied to my limited knowledge. Any hope of examining dinosaur "Stem Cells", possibally contributing more to the overall study of Jurassic genetics than has so far been found?

  • Images (Score:4, Informative)

    by mrgrey ( 319015 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @08:57AM (#9386420) Homepage Journal
    Here's a link to the story with images.

    Link [abc.net.au]

    http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1128 68 4.htm

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