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Buy Your Own T. Rex Skeleton
NoNsense wrote to us about the team-up of Millionaire.com and auctions.lycos.com are auctioning a complete T. Rex skeleton. Yes, the opening price of $5.8 million includes shipping of the 25-foot-tall, 40-foot-long skeleton. Cool. I was going to buy a new house soon anyway. *grin*
Seriously, I don't know if this is good or not. On the plus side, it opens the door to amateur paleantologists in a way we've not seen since Mary Annings.*
On the down side, I doubt this'll end up in any amateur's collection. More than likely, some CEO somewhere will adorn the entrance hall to their multi-million dollar mansion with this skeleton, as a talking piece.
T. Rex is -not- common, and complete T. Rex skeletons are extremely rare. The dangers posed by one of the few skeletons in existance vanishing into the home of some mega-wealthy moron who wouldn't know the difference between a dinosaur and a dog, are frightening. Such deals -should- be actively discouraged or even prohibited. Failure to do so could irrevocably damage our extremely fragile understanding of those ancient times.
*For those who don't know, Mary Annings was a 12-year old who liked discovering entirely new species of dinosaur, for the fun of it. She's credited with the discovery of three entirely new species, and probably had one of the most extensive collections of fossils ever assembled outside of a national museum.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Some anonymous coward dun said:
Barring some miracle (finding some huge tick in amber that was drinking away on a tyrannosaur or deinonych), it's rather unlikely we'll ever find dinosaur DNA from fossils. (Pity too--then it could probably be proven for certain just how close Archaeopteryx and Deinonychus were, and more importantly, how closely related both are to modern birds.)
For starters, most of the fossils like the frozen mammoths and Neandertal skeletons from which DNA has been extracted are actually still bone--they've not been replaced by minerals yet, which isn't the case with dino bones or really ANY remains older than the Ice Age for that matter. (If memory serves, the Australopithecus remains are right at that line where stuff starts turning to rock...pity, because it'd be really nice to get some australopithecine DNA to see how chimplike it was [possibly even enough to prove humans are basically nekkid chimps with big heads who can't walk properly :)]...or to see just what it was genetically that made Australopithecus different enough from other apes to go on the evolutionary path it did)
About the only real chance to find dino DNA is in amber from ticks, and even then it is probably so degraded as to be useless...dinos in ice, one can forget, unless one is talking about very recent remains that we tend to call birds :)
And speaking of birds, dinosaurs, and the tricks to raise them...I'll touch on that below. ;)
I have some nitpicks, but some can be excused as crappy American education ;) Anyhoo...
Nitpick the First: Crocs aren't lizards. Crocodilians, along with thecodonts [the ancestral archosaurs, now extinct], pterosaurs, and dinosaurs [including birds--most paleontologist agree birds are a subclass of theropod dinosaurs--this is going to be important in a few, so remember that little fact] are in a class called Archosauria and in fact are only slightly more related to lizards than mammals and their ancestors, thecodonts, are. (The line that led to "mammal-like reptiles" and theraspids [including mammals] split from diapsids [the line that led separately to lizards and archosaurs] shortly after reptiles in general evolved from amphibians; turtles then probably split first, then lizards, and archosaurs went their merry way shortly after). This one, I'l lgive you, because (thanks to certain fundamentalist groups in the US who shan't be mentioned who tend to throw massive hissy fits whenever evolution is mentioned in the schools) this isn't typically taught outside of paleontology books. :)
Nitpick the Second: Crocs aren't primitive. Protocrocs split off from the main line of archosaur evolution close to the same time as dinosaurs and pterosaurs did, and crocodilians are amazingly adapted to being water predators. (Early crocs were far more gracile, stood more erect, and could even have had roughly the metabolism of monotreme mammals; yes, cold-bloodedness in crocs is thought now to be a secondary trait. The crocodilian cardiovascular system is now recognised as being possibly one of the most advanced, period; it allows crocs to go into suspended animation, among other things, and is again adapted to the crocodilian role as a water predator. These are pretty much the crocs that have survived; many early ones were ground-runners, and are now extinct.) I may give this to you if you don't have the Discovery Channel or somesuch; there was a very good show on crocs that explains just how completely they are adapted as water predators and how much they've changed from early crocs.
Nitpick the Third: Crocs aren't even the most closely related animals to dinosaurs, most likely. (Remember, crocs are very derived, among other things.) The closest group to many dinosaurs is Aves, that is, birds...in fact, feathered dinosaurs have been found, and most paleontologist agree that dinosaurs never went extinct completely at all but that a group of small, toothless theropods adapted for flight survived that we today call birds and that Aves should probably be sunk into either a group in the Dinosauria or even as a subgroup of theropods.
The fact that Dinosauria is a pretty big clade in and of itself (probably as big as mammals at its peak), and further considering that there were possibly groups that gave live birth (this has been theorised for the big sauropods) as well as laid eggs makes things just a bit difficult. The fact that--in essence--what happened to dinosaurs would be equivalent to all species of mammals other than insectivorous bats becoming extinct and evolving into a plethora of bat species over 65 million years also makes things difficult, if you don't want to raise theropods.
In a way, the fact that most dinos DID lay eggs makes things a bit easier; embryo transfer has been done with both bird eggs and crocodilian eggs, and people have successfully clutched croc-eggs (you don't so much need a mom as an incubator) and foster-mom birds have clutched and reared birds in past. Also (surprisingly) even with big Mesozoic dinos, eggs haven't been found that are larger than ostrich eggs (not even for big theropods--it's thought dinosaur babies grew VERY fast, like birds now).
Probably the easiest dinosaurs to raise (were we able to (miracle of miracles) find enough DNA to sequence and end up with something that wouldn't be some gelatinous lump with wings growing out of its deformed head) would be theropods. First off, a subgroup of theropods survives (birds); secondly, recent fossil evidence shows at least advanced Cretaceous-era theropods had hard-shelled eggs like birds and clutched eggs in similar fashion to large birds (an oviraptorid nest has been found with momma-oviraptor brooding her eggs); thirdly, (modern) theropods have been reared without any theropodian mom at all (condors have been reared with hand-puppets and incubated to hatch eggs; the main thing you have to watch for in birds and similar species is imprinting, where they think the first object they see is Mom, which is important if you want to eventually raise baby dinosaurs).
Knowing whether theropod eggs are closer to bird-eggs or croc-eggs is important--croc eggs have to be kept moist and CANNOT be turned, while most bird-eggs mostly have to be kept warm and MUST be turned every so often. It'd also be good to know the optimum temperature range, which would probably require guesswork; croc sexing is dependent on temperature, as is sexing in many kinds of birds including turkeys. (Yes, this is true even though birds have sex-determining chromosomes [which actually work exactly the reverse of ours--ZZ is male, ZW is female]. But then again, there are cases in humans of folks with one set of chromosomes saying they're male but their body developed entirely as female [and vice versa]...so it's not perfect.) A deep genetic search would also be good to make sure whether dinos DID have ZZ/ZW sex differentiation (we'd then know just when chromosomal sex determination evolved with archosaurs; we THINK it evolved sometime after the ancestor of marsupials and placental mammals evolved from monotremes with mammals/therapsids).
(As an aside--they don't even know if they can get enough mammoth DNA to clone. Mammoths are somewhat easy to clone, for extinct mammals anyways; mammoths only went completely extinct around 8000 or so years ago and Asian elephants are fairly closely related. Cloning, say, smilodonts if one found a frozen saber-toothed kitty would be considerably harder; smilodonts are fairly distantly related to all modern cats (they split off around the time cat evolution was good and started), and there's no real guarantee that, say, a lion or tiger could carry a smilodont cub to term. One'd have similar probs if musk oxen were to go extinct completely. Fortunately, with some exceptions, most of your major groups of Ice Age animals were closely related to animals which are still around which makes cloning MUCH easier. ;) Cloning animals that don't require lengthy incubation periods in a uterus is MUCH easier by comparison, because one doesn't have to search so much for foster moms and can worry more about incubation and feeding. :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
T-Rex for sale.
Naked and petrified.