First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber (nationalgeographic.com) 70
The tail of a beautiful, feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar. It is a huge breakthrough that could help open a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years. From a report on the National Geographic: The semitranslucent mid-Cretaceous amber sample, roughly the size and shape of a dried apricot, captures one of the earliest moments of differentiation between the feathers of birds of flight and the feathers of dinosaurs. Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside. CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae. NPR has a story on how this amber was found. An excerpt from it reads: In 2015, Lida Xing was visiting a market in northern Myanmar when a salesman brought out a piece of amber about the size of a pink rubber eraser. Inside, he could see a couple of ancient ants and a fuzzy brown tuft that the salesman said was a plant. As soon as Xing saw it, he knew it wasn't a plant. It was the delicate, feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur.
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We finally get a Jurassic Park remake with feathered velociraptors ?
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Will they be 1 ft tall like in reality?
Re: What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Yeah but then they will shoot it from a low angle to make them look taller.
They should get the director from antz...
False alarm. (Score:5, Funny)
Just a dead parrot.
Re: False alarm. (Score:1)
It is not dead. It is resting. Beautiful plumage.
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Just a dead parrot.
It's not dead, it's just pining for the fjords
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Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major.
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THIS IS AN EX - PARROT!
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it's just pining for the fjords
You can't fool me. The dinosaur is older than the fjords.
(Based on exactly zero knowledge of the age of either)
But... (Score:3)
Re:But... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure the Jurssaic-era Park would be a disaster, dinosaurs squawking and dropping feathers and poop everywhere. Changing square miles of newspaper every few days is a hassle.
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You're not, actually, entirely wrong- though it's more like a dead parrot's great-great-great-great-great-great...-great-grandmother.
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Why do you think there's only a bit of tail left?
It's like eating ramen, sometimes a little bit of noodle doesn't get slurped down and falls out! It's not likely dinosaur had good noodle slurping lips.
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Why do you think there's only a bit of tail left?
It's like eating ramen, sometimes a little bit of noodle doesn't get slurped down and falls out! It's not likely dinosaur had good noodle slurping lips.
Great, now I got an image of a T-Rex trying to use chopsticks stuck in my head... great...
still, not as bad as a T-Rex trying to play chopsticks... dammit!
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Easy solution. (Score:1)
Let's just ask the Grays to give us some dino DNA samples from when they collected them years ago.
Question (Score:2, Interesting)
I know amber is fossilized tree resin, but at this point is it possible to somehow dissolve the amber without destroying what's inside it?
It would be interesting if it could be done so we could see the tail and feathers in real light without the amber being in between.
Also, from the picture, there are bits and pieces of vegetation not to mention at least one ant inside the specimen which could be recovered.
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Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
AFAIK you don't want to mess with solvents when it comes to amber. The stuff's origin is resinous could theoretically be attacked with something like turpentine or a petroleum solvent. However the amber is hard; you'd be better off dealing with it like paleontologists approach dinosaur bones in rock.
Ultimately though it's probably all a bad idea. Amber has proven itself to be an ideal preservation mechanism, lasting tens or hundreds of millions of years. Once the specimen is released from the amber shell, it is vulnerable to oxidation, fungal attack, physical disturbance and all the rest. It's the sort of thing you could consider for a few of your less-valuable specimens. You don't want to ruin your best stuff on some quixotic quest to make it 'better'.
It would be a bit like approaching a dinosaur skeleton, fully restored and in museum display quality. Then going to the keepers of the displays and saying, "I want to free the display specimens from the obscuring qualities of the glues and lacquers, the unnatural steel support structures holding it up, the clearly fake restored components, and the interference of the display cases and presentation stands!"
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Jeff Goldblum says that this is a bad idea.
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Jurassic Park? (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, when Chrighton wrote the original book 24-odd years ago, it was NOT 'science fiction' - it was definitely viable science based on the knowledge of the day. Amber was known to preserve soft-tissue, mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects from the dinosaur era had been found in amber and DNA had been recovered from amber.
It seemed entirely within the realm of what would be possible in the next few years.
In the intervening period a few things happened:
1) It was found that the DNA from the original species in the amber decayed
2) The human genome project was completed -and came with a massively shocking discovery: human DNA was far simpler than that of animals we'd genotyped years earlier like frogs (indeed - an order of magnitude fewer genes), which when we had to explain how that's possible turned our entire view of how DNA works upside down. The current view is that DNA is not a blueprint for a species, but a set of instructions for building a member of one - which makes assumptions. The more advanced the species is, the more assumptions can be made and the fewer conditionals have to be specified in the code. It's like stripping off the 'if arch == x86' part of your code because nobody uses a 32-bit computer anymore. Frogs have DNA to repond to various temperature ranges, humity levels etc. etc. basically to adjust the growth of the fetus to the ever-changing conditions in the pond all the time. Humans have a womb with very fixed conditions - so none of those are needed.
3) With this realization - we actually genotyped the DNA recovered from amber - and it turned out to be from (much later) external contamination (mostly bacterial DNA).
Those things shifted the Jurassic park scenario firmly into the science fiction region - but one should be fair to a brilliant writer with some pretty solid scientific credentials (in the field of medicine), when it was written it was in the realm of highly conceivable science fiction.
He also updated his writing to reflect changes in the field. His last book "Timeline" also deals with genetics - and is set firmly in the areas of genetics where active research is happening right now, and dealing with the (very significant) social and legal questions that is raised by such ridiculous concepts as allowing companies to patent genes.
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It was potentially viable science. However since nobody had actually done it then it's fiction by definition.
Re: Jurassic Park? (Score:2)
Yes I worded that sentence badly. I was trying to say it was highly scientiffic sifi rather than highly speculative.
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At least they now can make a remake where a huge pile of feathers can indicate that a dinosaur fight took place.
tail feathers from bird (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's a wing tip, not a tail. And, incidentally, the same people are quoted in that article, also about amber from Myanmar.
They are the first Cretaceous plumage samples to be studied that are not simply isolated feathers, according to study co-author Lida Xing of the China University of Geosciences.
"The biggest problem we face with feathers in amber is that we usually get small fragments or isolated feathers, and we’re never quite sure who produced [them]," says co-author Ryan McKellar, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at Canada's Royal Saskatchewan Museum.
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And, incidentally, the same people are quoted in that article, also about amber from Myanmar.
Yeah, but no one reads the article :)
I used to write +5 moderated comments over and over, merely by reading the article, and restating some interesting points here in the comments. Easy mod points, and the mods hadn't read the article.
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I think Lida Xing is a marked man. If he shows interest in your piece of amber in the amber market in Myitkyina, you mark that thing up. Did I say this was $100? No, I meant $10,000.
That looks gross (Score:1)
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Because they have actually seen dinosaur tail bones before, believe it or not. They've also seen ancient bird bones. It's true, amazing I know, but it's true.
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I think you might have broken my sarcasm detector. It is pegged at the maximum now, and won't drop back down.
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Have you seen any posts from our mutual friend lately? I haven't seen much from him since the last time I tore into him a few months ago.
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He seems to have backed off on his rants recently, though I have seen a couple. I think he decided last time that I wasn't worth arguing with, so hasn't pestered me in a while.
Jurassic Park That Much Closer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Either way, what a huge find, this is awesome! Colors, positioning, type of feathers. The feathers on this tail are more floppy like the display, not flight, feathers in modern birds, showing that sexual display likely came before flight in evolution. Colors probably were important early on some are saying.
Bird-like dinosaurs just got a whole lot more real.
Taxonomy (Score:2)
By today's taxonomy, birds ARE dinosaurs, not descendants of dinosaurs. But that would make the story less sensational. Besides, people need to hold onto their incorrect schooling that says that all dinosaurs were just huge lizards, even though the two have little to do with each other.
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Those guys were so dumb believing that dinosaurs were reptiles.
For most of the Triassic and part of the Jurassic, they were, as the archosaurs, the common ancestors to both modern reptiles and birds, were around up to the Triassic and it wasn't until later in the Jurassic that dinosaurs started developing bird like features.
Beautiful transition specimen (Score:4, Interesting)
We are predisposed to think of feathers as equipment for flying. But seeing all those flying "dinosaurs" flitting about our yard is misleading.
Reptilian scales are basically fish scales that have been greatly toughened to control moisture loss, allowing colonization of the land. But if you are a non-big dinosaur, thermal regulation is a significant problem. Feathers are basically scales that can be fluffed up or laid flat, to varying degrees, giving different insulating profiles, at the cost of possibly losing some moisture, which many dinosaurs could well afford.
The feather more appropriate for flying could have been variants that were big for display and could lay very flat. But the original purpose was not flying. Flatness is possibly desirable for: reducing insulation when desired, streamlining the body if traveling quickly through brush, making big visual displays with relatively light equipment. However a small dinosaur that jumped around trees would find that large flattish feathers would give it added control over gliding descents, which is a fabulous thing if you are in a hurry.