Giant Dinosaurs Were Fastest Growing Animals Ever 64
sciencehabit writes "Lufengosaurus, a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that lived in China during the Jurassic period, were the biggest animals of their age, measuring 30 feet long. Now, fossilized embryos reveal that they were also the fastest growing animals on record — 'faster than anything we have ever seen,' according to one researcher. What's more, researchers have found traces of organic matter in their bones, which may belong to the oldest fossil proteins ever found."
Full article hidden inside pay-wall (Score:3, Informative)
Tried and failed to read the full article in the Science magazine, it's a paywall, unfortunately
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Giant Dinosaurs Got a Head Start on Growth
by Lizzie Wade on 10 April 2013, 1:10 PM
Nearly 200 million years ago, some of the earliest dinosaurs on Earth laid their eggs in modern Yunnan Province in southern China, only to have one nest after another destroyed by floods. Today, the remains of those lost eggs—and the embryonic dinosaurs that they contained—are helping scientists understand how their relatives grew up to be giants.
The destroyed nests probably belonged to Lufengosaurus, a long-necked
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Thanks, but he was referring to the Nature article itself, i.e. the scientific publication: "Embryology of Early Jurassic dinosaur from China with evidence of preserved organic remains [doi.org]".
one word (Score:1)
What's more, researchers have found traces of organic matter in their bones, which may belong to the oldest fossil proteins ever found."
one word: jurassicparkjurassicparkjurassicparkjurassicpark!!!1!!1!
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"faster than all other known dinosaurs and all living birds" isn't quite the same thing as "fastest growing animals ever". Blue Whales grow pretty fast too.
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article? this is slashdot, get with the program, we make stuff up as we argue on our perceived idea of what the article sounds like as we go along - with bonus points if you can come up with a car analogy. :p
Re:Full article hidden inside pay-wall (Score:4, Informative)
Not to be snarky at all, but a subscription to Science is well worth it for the summary articles and overviews (assuming you're into that sort of thing). It's a refreshing change from the ten line garbled summaries you find elsewhere.
Of course, that doesn't answer the problem of having a paywalled article as reference to a thread. It's not like people would read it, but we must keep up with appearances.
Re:Dinosaurs use protien based host files (Score:5, Funny)
cue the "my dinosaur is the fastest growing on earth: it grows 9 inches per second" jokes.
Full length in a quarter second? Impressive!
Dino burgers! (Score:1, Funny)
Jurassic Park them for meat!
Obviously they haven't (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously they haven't heard of Cowboyneal
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Or maybe it has something to do with higher amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere millions of years ago.
More likely carbon. Plants and the animals they eat them are mostly made of water and carbon. The carbon comes from the air. The less CO2 there is in the air the more slowly plants and animals grow.
Re:There was less junk DNA around back then (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, because the limiting factor in cellular division is copying DNA.
Protip: It's not.
Re:There was less junk DNA around back then (Score:5, Informative)
When I was a student in the early 1990s I was introduced to the concept of 'junk' DNA. I didn't believe in it then, and now it turns out that scientists find more and more interesting information in 'junk' DNA that is necessary for an organism to grow and function. [medicalnewstoday.com]
Re:There was less junk DNA around back then (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the scientists currently on the DNA-decode job should bring in some reverse-engineers, or e.g. the MAME team, to figure out just how the decoding truly goes, since the "junk" seems to be used less as copyable data and more like arcane utility code. Interdisciplinary study and all that.
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it turns out that scientists find more and more interesting information in 'junk' DNA that is necessary for an organism to grow and function. [medicalnewstoday.com]
Just as with software development. What looks like junk is usually the core of the system.
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Junk DNA is basically this:
http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall11/CSCI-GA.2965-001/geneticalgex [nyu.edu]
We are very complex machines with LOTS of unexpected connections. Take out one little bit of "junk" DNA, the whole thing collapses because of the utterly bizarre inter-dependencies that have evolved over millions of years.
Here's the revelant bit: (Score:4, Interesting)
That repertoire turns out to be more intriguing than Thompson could
have imagined. Although the configuration program specified tasks for
all 100 cells, it transpired that only 32 were essential to the
circuit's operation. Thompson could bypass the other cells without
affecting it. A further five cells appeared to serve no logical
purpose at all--there was no route of connections by which they could
influence the output. And yet if he disconnected them, the circuit
stopped working.
It appears that evolution made use of some physical property of these
cells--possibly a capacitive effect or electromagnetic inductance--to
influence a signal passing nearby. Somehow, it seized on this subtle
effect and incorporated it into the solution.
-------------
Another challenge is to make the circuit work over a wide temperature
range. On this score, the human digital scheme proves its
worth. Conventional microprocessors typically work between -20 0C and
80 0C. Human designers set the clock so that chip components have
enough time to settle into a digital value. As many computer hackers
know, they can turn up the clock speed if they keep the temperature of
the microprocessor low because the transistors settle into their on or
off states more quickly when cold.
Thompson's evolved circuit only works over a 10 0C range--the
temperature range in the laboratory during the experiment. This is
probably because the temperature changes the capacitance, resistance
or some other property of the circuit's components. Whatever the
cause, this is a serious drawback. If the circuit needs a temperature
controller to enable it to operate, then it is no longer a cheap,
low-power device. But evolution could come to the rescue here as well.
In a future genetic algorithm, Thompson plans to score circuits not
only on how well they perform an electronic task, but also on how well
they cope with temperature variation. Evolution might, for example,
create a design that includes a set of subcircuits each of which
operates over a different temperature range. If this fails to solve
the problem, Thompson will try giving the FPGA a clock. But he won't
tell the circuit what to do with it. "It will be a resource--we'll see
what use evolution makes of it," he says.
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Re: There was less junk DNA around back then (Score:2)
That's very interesting, but can you elaborate on how that works? Has there been research into that?
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Junk is a misnomer. All of DNA is a hodge podge jumble of stuff. It is not nicely sorted and categorized and compacted.
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Don't worry, he's already there.
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What in the hell are you talking about, and why is this modded informative? There's no correlation between the amount of non-coding DNA and rates of cell division or success as species. Junk DNA does not continuously accumulate "more and more every generation". Stuff gets cut out too. It's more of an equilibrium.
The analogy is an amusing one, but not correct in terms of the implications for living things. Some organisms have TONS of non-coding DNA and replicate and reproduce just fine compared to close
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I'm sure all that "junk" DNA has a function.
If it really slows down growth, it'd be an evolutionary disadvantage over those who do not carry all that junk DNA around for they'd grow up faster, and spend less time being small and vulnerable. Dinos are point in case: they're believed to grow so big as protection against predators, be so big that they can't kill you any more. So also they had to grow very fast, as being any smaller would mean they're vulnerable.
Also, why would we have picked up so much junk DN
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There is no such thing as "junk" DNA. (Score:2)
Categorizing whatever you don't truly understand as "junk" is the most perfect demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect possible.
Let's clone and eat Lufengosaurs! (Score:2)
how would they know? (Score:2)
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I think it's quite safe to assume that the dinos this study is dedicated to are less than one year old, as this is about dinos that were still in their eggs.
OTOH I'd guess it's normal for a dino to multiply it's size while still in the egg. Just look at human babies, they grow like a hundred times in length and something like a thousand times in weight from the moment they're recognisable as human (arms, legs, head) until they're born. After birth they grow only about four times in length and some 20 times
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What they would be looking at is the internal morphology of the bones.
Fast - but how fast, really? (Score:4, Interesting)
The article doesn't mention much about how fast they really grew.
How long did it take them to reach adult size, for example?
And related: what was the approx. lifespan of such animals?
How could they manage the food intake for that growth? This are plant eaters, and plants are not the most efficient sources of energy - leaves are pretty hard to digest, especially compared to meat. So they must eat a lot of it (probably pretty much constantly), and have a rather efficient digestive system that can handle the huge quantities of food.
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Sauropod Growth Rate [geoscienceworld.org]
faster than anything we have ever seen (Score:2)
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Considering that chickens are the closest living relative to dinosaurs, I wouldn't be too surprised if they did. Of course, serving a Pterodactylus wing would mean placing a 2.5 foot wing on the table.
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Not even remotely true (Score:1)
You need to come to my home state and take a look at some of the mammals we have here. They truck around in their motorized wheelchairs in the isles of Walmart.
So? (Score:1)
C'mon, we've all seen it, you toss the capsule in the bathwater, and BOOM, you got yourself a dinosaur in a few seconds, how is this news?
Did Jesus? (Score:2)