German Paleontologists Find a 'Near-Perfect' Dinosaur Fossil 99
First time accepted submitter howzit writes "German paleontologists have discovered what they believe is the best-preserved dinosaur skeleton ever found. The flesh-eating member of the theropod subgroup, which walked on its hind legs, is about 98 percent complete, and also includes preserved bits of skin. 'The around 135-million-year-old fossil is of outstanding scientific importance.'"
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Better yet, can we extract DNA and start a Jurassic Park with this discovery?
If so, sign me up for the beta!
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If you're not a mathematician, an eight year-old boy, a 12 year-old girl, or a paleontologist you might want to rethink that plan.
ESPECIALLY if you're a lawyer or game warden.
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It just so happens that I am studying math at university, nothing in chaos theory though. Wish me luck!
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but .. do you know UNIX ?
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Uhmmm... presvered skin? (Score:1)
How?
Seriously... how? How could *ANY* amount of skin be preserved for that amount of time?
Also.... "loaned" to a museum?
For crying out loud, why? Give it to them, sell it to them, or whatever... but what are you going to do with a 135 million year old dinosaur fossil?
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what are you going to do with a 135 million year old dinosaur fossil?
Science?
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Re:Uhmmm... presvered skin? (Score:5, Informative)
It happens if the dead body is immediately covered by an air tight layer of e.g. sand, tar or mud. So you find many well preserved fossils in former swamps, river banks or tar pits. In this case it seems to have been preserved by sinking in the seabed of the Paratethys, part of the Tethys, which was an ocean between Africa and Eurasia, and whose remainings are the contemporan Mediterran.
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IF this is an appropriate correlation, then the environment of deposition is likely to have been an intermittently stratified and anoxic lagoon of brackish water with active deposition of (phytoplanktonic) carbonate. Storm- or flood-driven overturning events are thought to have lead to intermittent d
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People loan such finds to museums rather than donating outright so that they retain some control over how the find is maintained, displayed, and so on. If the museum does a poor job of maintaining the fossil or puts it in some back closet where the public can't see it, one would like to be able to take it back and loan it to a museum that will treat it better.
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Plenty of things are loaned out (See what NASA does alot) simply so they retain their rights over the product while still allowing it to be showcased (recognition) or allowed to be further researched. Generally speaking, this is standard practice for stuff like these. The main reason is, that the person maintain control over who gets to see it and where it's located and under what conditions. One example is that instead of a museum owning it and showing it only in 1 city, a person may loan out the bones to
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They're going to take it to an island off New Zealand and clone it?
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Just remember, feeding politicians to the keas is a bad idea - their natural diet is nuts and the added protein would be bad for them.
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feeding politicians to the keas is a bad idea - their natural diet is nuts and the added protein would be bad for them.
Protein bad for them? How about the saturated fats?
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That's why New Zealand is already working on cloning Moas. Plenty of meat for T Rex and the KFC fast food chains to divide between them.
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They're going to take it to an island off New Zealand and clone it?
They declared it a cultural asset so... the fossil can't leave Germany... so no cloning:-(
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They declared it a cultural asset
German culture is very old . . . but THAT old? Old like dinosaurs?
"Hey, who y'all callin' my kin-folk dinosaurs!?"
Is it really dinosaur skin that they found? Or dinosaur Lederhosen?
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Re:Uhmmm... presvered skin? (Score:5, Insightful)
The "skin" is still fossilized, but you can see the texture and possibly structure of it. It's not preserved in the way you're thinking. Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.
A fossil like this is rare and worth a decent amount. Collectors will pay obscene amounts for it, amounts that a museum may not be able to match. So just be happy they loaned it to a museum at all, so at least we can glean some scientific knowledge from it.
Re:Uhmmm... presvered skin? (Score:5, Informative)
A fossil like this is rare and worth a decent amount. Collectors will pay obscene amounts for it, amounts that a museum may not be able to match. So just be happy they loaned it to a museum at all, so at least we can glean some scientific knowledge from it.
Some good news on that front, from the article:
"The fossil, discovered between one and two years ago, has been registered as a German cultural asset, giving it a status that drastically lowers its monetary worth, but ensures the artefact will remain in the country.
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it's very common for artifacts and pcs of artwork to be on loan to a museum or other institution. Typically they are loaned in perpetuity, for a century( or other long period) or until the owner dies, when commonly the item is willed to the museum, or it is willed to another but only if they agree to leave it with the museum. technically, the person or persons who own the object retain ownership but are not responsible for insuring it or for it's upkeep/ repair, that becomes the responsibility of the muse
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Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.
Not exactly, I don't remember the specifics exactly, but it wasn't soft matter itself. It was either fossilized itself or only the successor chemicals to like hemoglobin or such like that. (There are some YouTube videos that talk about it, probably try C0nc0rdance [youtube.com]). I know this detail because some creationists bring it up as a statement of "oh, well, this stuff breaks up in only a couple thousand years, so obviously the remains couldn't be as old as scientists claim it to be." Don't worry about being misled
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Also.... "loaned" to a museum? For crying out loud, why? Give it to them, sell it to them, or whatever...
The reason is very simple. If you loan it to them then they can't turn around and sell the parts off to make money (fund raising) or decide its not worth the time and just throw it away or do anything that might destroy it. You will basically not get it back unless they say they no longer want it, then you find another museum who might want it.
Whit, what? 135M yr old? (Score:5, Funny)
Source: Conservapedia [conservapedia.com]
[/irony]
This post was here to show a type of (unexpected) reaction to this type of news nowadays.
Re:Whit, what? 135M yr old? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Quoted from below.
If you are wondering how skin could last for such a long time you may find this (http://creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue-and-protein-even-more-confirmation) article relevant.
I agree it's boring, but they still keep dragging themselves out into public discourse...
Re:Whit, what? 135M yr old? (Score:4, Funny)
No no no.... the earth wasn't created in 6000 years. It was created in 6 days (7 if you count vacation days). The apparent much greater age arises from the universe being created in an "adult" state so that it would be ready to utilize for the life forms to be placed within, not to deceive the life forms within, but to simply be utilizable. Adam and Eve, for example, were created as fully formed adults, it is ludicrous to think that the universe itself would not be. Because we associate that maturity with actual time passing, we perceive that the earth is much older than it is... so if we believe the universe to be many millions of years old because of how old it appears, we are actually deceiving ourselves - it is not God who deceives us.
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No. Adam would not remember his parents because he never had any. Even a mere instant after his creation, he would have appeared to absolutely any amount of physiological study to be a fully matured adult, and absolutely no degree of scrutiny would be able to detect otherwise. He was physically mature, with the ability to reason, to communicate coherently, and to cognitively understand his surroundings, all properties that today we only acquire through time and experience. One key difference between h
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Personally, I am an Old Earth Creationist and consider Genesis to be largely allegorical (though, I do believe Adam and Eve actually existed, as "metaphysical clones", if you will, from a pre-existing population of humans per se), but I do find this "per the laws of physics, the apparent artifacts of time must be present for a viable physical structure" position to be able to be taken remarkably far...
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Convincing argument, there.
I'll let entropy handle you.
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The creation of the universe is something wholly outside of all human experience, and no person who was ever born has ever had any personal knowledge or experience of anything coming out of nothing, so it's not really unreasonable for anyone to conclude that a nebula is actually many billions of years old based on that experience... But rational or not, such a conclusion based solely on that experience is really nothing more than rationalized self-deception.
It is also true that no person who was ever born has ever had any personal knowledge or experience of any impossible state of affairs. That does not make any impossible thing more possible just because we don't know what it would be like to experience that impossible thing. Or, indeed, help us work out which impossible thing would be more likely.
How about you work out a consensus "God(s) made everything we see just like so" story with all the other religions than the one you happen to cleave to? Because,
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Are you 12?
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Any sane person would prefer sodomy over Bible-study.
It should also be noted that sodomy is not forbidden by the 10 commandments while the creation of an image of Jesus that is common in churches all around the world is.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth - Exodus 20:1-17
Why (Score:3, Insightful)
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>>Source: Conservapedia
Sigh. Conservapedia's entire science section should be hauled out behind the barn and shot. They're doing everything they can to reinforce the stereotype of the anti-science conservative (which the a lot aren't, though you'd never know it from the stereotyping that goes on here).
That said, they tend to be better than Wikipedia on certain topics, such as the history of the Cold War. On wikipedia, consensus dictates that the "Red Scare" had no basis in reality, was nothing but a w
Ussher In a New Age (Score:3, Funny)
I know the name... (Score:5, Funny)
It's a Wolpertinger!
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How about "Rory Calhoun"?
Unfortunately... (Score:1)
... a German satellite fell and broke it to bits... karma sucks!
Beautiful (Score:2)
Truly a beautiful find.
Re:Bone Parts? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "damaged" hip is actually one of the two main features used to tell a theropod away from other dinosaurs. The theropods ischium is facing backwards, while their illium faces forwards. This is the ancestral configuration, although it was secondarily lost in the species most closely related to birds, which have *both* facing backwards,
Plant-eating Ornithischia, like the Triceratops, on the other hand, evolved that "new" hip configuration much earlier.
dumb question (Score:2)
Why does it have such a long tail?
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Balance!
Best preserved... IN EUROPE (Score:2)
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Ironic because Europe has some damn-good sites for preserving dinosaur-age animals (Solnhofen limestone of Germany [berkeley.edu]). Also US dominates the world university list...
Preservation details (Score:3)
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"Preserved in stone" doe not answer the GP's question. Also, does it has feathers? And how are they?
The article makes a very nice job of explaining nothing of importance, out of the "this is the best preserved dinossaur fossil" bit.
And I wonder how long it will take (Score:2)
Plus it's already been established that modern humans date back over 100,000 years now. So I'd say that their 6,000 year old earth theory is complete bunk.
And now, we have evidence of a fossil from 135 Million years ago. It's getting good.
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So I'd say that their 6,000 year old earth theory is complete bunk.
Either that or their "theory of creation" is true, and God's telling everyone a vastly elaborate lie with all those sneaky isotopic ratios and photon distributions in the CMB.
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There is one other thing that irritates me about the religious dominionists/fundamentalists. It's the fact that the vast majority of them have never read the entire tex
T-Rex Sue almost fully preserved (Score:2)
Nothing ever changes (Score:2)
Even 135million years ago, the top 2% received special treatment, ducking out of fossilization.