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Dinosaur Mummy Found
sckienle writes "Although the dig was a year ago, MSNBC has an article about a very rare dinosaur find. It starts off with "A mummified dinosaur, unwrapped from the rocks of Montana, has revealed how the creature looked and how it lived 77 million years ago -- down to the texture of its skin and the contents of its stomach, scientists say." Unfortunately, the details are mostly missing in the article. This isn't the first mummified dinosaur found but it is the first in a long time."
Kind of like the Stego in Animal Crossing!
does it have the contents of the stomach? I'd sure like to know how the dinosaurs managed to balance their food diet considering their weight...
A dinosaur daddy?
Well with a dinosaurs tiny brain, at least the imbalmers didnt have to spend too much time taking the brain out through the nose.
I'm not dead yet.
I'm getting better.
Now they can finally have the cross-over movie where Brandon Fraiser has to kick the crap out of old dinosaurs that have been cloned and are taking over a tropical island in egypt.
just you wait and see...
--
I post links to stuff here
I wonder if they'll find that lawyer from Jurrasic Park in it's stomach?
Interesting... I always wanted to be an archaeologist/paleontologist. We are learning so much about our past, but is anyone paying attention to how it might affect us in the future?
Are you saying that the aliens who built the pyramids were actually DINOSAURS?
(obligatory road trip reference)
I wonder what condition the meat underneath the skin was? Maybe there could be a giant cookout........ Mmmmmmm Dinosaur BBQ.................
So much for all those who were postulating about dinosaurs in Day-Glo colors... /Nanoox.
Dinosaurs had prior art.
Ok, I don't want to spark any big philosophical or religious debate on the origin of the universe and its age (although unfortunately one will probably ensue anyway)...BUT nowhere in the article does it say how they know it's 77 million years old. So how do they?
I'm assuming they go by some sort of carbon dating. What I'm asking all the geeks here is this: when scientists spout off numbers like this, what scientific means are they utilizing to back them up and how accurate are they?
I don't doubt the thing could very well *be* that old. I just wonder: how do they know?
Thanks, Jack, your free consulting services are very valuable. I'll be using them every time I need somebody to remind me to turn the clock back. I'll let all my friends know about it as well.
This item was found in the summer of 2000.
This article is very very vague. It states that the creature died when it was just 3 years old; I wonder why. The article doesn't say.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
is it me, or are most dino remains, tracks, etc. found in the western hemisphere?
Is no one else looking, or were they predominantly here?
Are the details slim because they don't want people to know that dinosaurs don't look anything like what all of the books published thus far have told us they look like? I would guess so.
that the dinosaur ate pringles and drank bawls for energy for those long nights of arguing on slashdot. :)
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
We've always known that paleontologists were mostly just guessing at things, but how the heck are they going to figure out "how such dinosaurs were built and how they moved" from a stomach full of "ferns, conifers and a magnolia-type plant"???
~Chaltek
Plenty of things are mummified by nature...
I would like to say what everyone else is thinking (mods be damned) You are a idiot. Jeebus save you.
Nowhere in the article does it say how they know it's 23 foot long.
I'm assuming they go by some sort of measuring tape. What I'm asking all the geeks here is this: when scientists spout off numbers like this, what scientific means are they utilizing to back them up and how accurate are they?
I don't doubt the thing could very well *be* that long. I just wonder: how do they know?
Wow no, I don't think anyone has ever thought of that.
Better get right on it, sounds like a life's work...
Woop woop. If I wasn't a newbie, and had some mod-points they would be all yours.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
You have it backwards. Radio carbon dating is good for maybe 40,000 or 50,000 years, nothing older than that. The closer we are to when it died, by a long shot the more accurate the dating is.
This would've been done by dating the strata they were found in. Dating rock strata is a very accurate method of determining age.
MOD DOWN! Wait till the last week in October, foo'.
Moderators - take note.
This post is an attempt to trick the slashdot crowd into not properly changing their clocks this weekend and thus being late for work on Monday. Daylight savings time does not end on the 26th, it ends on the 13th of Oct.
Don't be fooled by this heinous troll.
This question and many more about dating are answered at Talk-Origins,
t ml#other
r on-dating.ht ml
See
General dating:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.h
Specific theory & technique:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/isoch
(now how many geeks will read these dating articles thinking it might help this weekend with the GF problem?:-)...
Daylight Saving Time begins for most of the United States at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April. Time reverts to standard time at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October. In the U.S., each time zone switches at a different time.
The last Sunday THIS year is on October 27th.
getting mummified (a very technical process performed by Man?)
...
Mummyfied is simply a term for extraordinary well preserved. This can happen because a human pulls out the brains and applies the right ointments, or because the specimen dies under extraordinary conditions - like the dry-freezed dude they found in the alps a couple of years ago.
There were some tracks discovered in the Paluxy River bed that had man tracks and dinosaur tracks side by side,
Could you perhaps elaborate a bit? What is your source? I would love to read more about it.
Tor
According to my college chemistry professor, carbon dating (and radioactive dating in general) is based on determining the current percentage of the isotope relative to the percentage of the non-radioactive element. This percentage is then compared to the original percentage and the half-life of the isotope - about 5K years for carbon.
Therefore, radioactive dating works best for time periods where the value of n in half_life * 2^n (^ = to the power of) is closest to 0. Very accurate for 5K years, 2.5K years, 1.25K years,10K years, 20K years. Very inaccurate for 1 year or 1 million years.
[btw, I'm no expert - just sayin' what I heard to the best of my recollection]
The atoms in your body are older than 77 million years. So are all the other atoms you will encounter.
Carbon dating is, like all other measurements, approximate. Journalists don't care about the accuracy of most measurements, so we don't hear "77 million years old, plus or minus 10 million years" Plus carbon dating makes many assumptions about the distrobution and decay of carbon that seem reasonable, but cannot be verifyied by prehistoric scientists. 77 million years is the best reasonable estimate that we can make at this time. Needless to say, this find is "damn old", and that's conclusive!
There were some tracks discovered in the Paluxy River bed that had man tracks and dinosaur tracks side by side, but of course you will not hear about this from the secular science establishment, which would just as soon cover it up.
Probably because it was determined long ago that they were not man tracks.
Yet Another Web Site
What they eat says volumes about how a dinosaur is built. A dinosaur that can stoop to get ferns and reach the leaves of conifers obviously has a certain length of neck and articulation of the spine. One that eats plants may not be as muscled or quick as one that eats other dinosaurs or carrion, mostly because it doesn't need to be.
Just from stomach contents we can tell what it was fast enough to catch, what it was tall enough to reach, what it could bend down to reach, and how much energy it had to work with. The condition of the contents tells us if it had blunted teeth or sharp ones. We have some clues from a skeleton, but we have a lot more information with some extra context: "Oh. That's why that neck was built like that."
Paul Sereno, for instance, has led expeditions into places like Niger, Morocco and Patagonia. The politics add an extra variable which makes it a pain in the ass to dig in another country, some countries more than others, so most American palentologists stay here. Also, it's a bitch to transport the fossils long distances after they're dug up. There's plenty of stuff to find here, so it's not really a problem.
They were definitely not predominantly here.
c-hack.com |
Did they ever find the Dinosaur Daddy?
This, of course, is so they can still write lots of fun papers, argue among themselves and ultimately sell an hour long show on it to National Geographic.
This tactic is unfortunately commonplace and not just to archiologists, paleontologists, etc. Consider ourselves lucky if we don't have to pay to get in and see it, like Meteor Crater, in Winslow AZ
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The scientists also noted that it appeared that the skin along it's back had been worn smooth from Natalie Portman's silky thighs, and that the stomach contents indicated that it's last meal was a bowl of Hot Grits.
(I'm sorry for this post, I really am.)
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
With all the hoopla about cloning these days it makes you wonder when they will be able to insert the DNA from this dinosaur into a reptile egg and develope a fully cloned dinosaur. With a couple of tons of DNA they should be able to get plenty of practice.
Mummified dinosaur - the words evoked Egyptians working on dinosaur preservation and a moment later it's that "naah!" feeling but you are curious completely knowing in advance that it is a fossil.
News is entertainment. Science is entertainment. Until anything isn't on the border of sensationalism, it doesn't matter anymore? Whatever happened to sincere inquisitiveness, wonder, and inquiry.
By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,
Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.
We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,
Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,
Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,
And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.
O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:
For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?
Scopas Brune
It wouldn't be carbon dating. Carbon 14 has a half life of about 5700 years, so after ~6000 years, it's got about 1/1000th of what was originally there (which is rather low to begin with). After that, I'm guessing that there's just too little to get reliable statistics from (perhaps noise from other decay sequences??).
Besides the problem of the (relatively) short half-life of Carbon14, the fossilization process leaches most of the carbon out of the body anyways-- so there is (almost) no carbon to date. Even if it didn't 1/2^(77million/5700) => 1/(2e4066). In other words, if you started with a chunk of carbon14 the size of Jupiter, you'd be lucky to find 2 atoms of carbon14 after 60million years of radioactive decay)
There's a nice intro to carbon dating at howstuffworks.com, with even more data at c14dating.com. They mention that you can use carbon-14 style radioisotape dating with isotopes that have a longer halflife than carbon 14. These are the methods are what are used to date older rocks.
The reason why carbon 14 isn't useful for recent items is the nuclear age. In the early years of the nuclear age, the US and later 'nuclear club' members did atmospheric nuke tests that completely messed up (read: randomized) the isotope ratios for everything that's died since the late '40s. Cherbonyl didn't help much, either. Anything earlier than that (and recent enough that there's a statistically valid percentage of C14 left in the body) is a good candidate for Carbon dating.
Prior to nuclear fallout, the primary source of Carbon14 was atmospheric Nitrogen being bombarded by cosmic rays.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
The cool thing is, if the stomach contents are intact enough, we may have access to some plant-life that was not previously available. This appears to be a duckbilled dinosaur, so it's likely a herbivore. Too bad, if it were a big-bad t-rex we may have gotten a 2-for-1 with anything else inside its stomach, depending on the state of digestion at death.
Personally, I'd be quite interested in the breathing and circulatory apparati of dinosaurs. Getting blood and oxygen around the systems of these big guys may have required organs a little different than current-day creatures (I don't think there are any reptiles this large alive to-date). Perhaps they're able to breathe through their skin, although I believe that is generally characteristic of amphibians and not reptiles.
Hmmm... tastes like million-year-old chicken - phorm
A summary of this work can be found in the documentary, "Caveman" by noted paleontologist and Christian, Dr. Ringo Starr.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Boris may have a difficult time getting into the dino outfit.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Earth is like cake. Everybody likes cake. Or maybe parfaits...
I generally begin with something naive and simple, say, a movie and a rootbeer float. Then just stare into it's eyes. After a couple of these perhaps you move onto something a little more romantic but you don't want to move too quickly or you may excite the situation and the whole relationship just decays.
Aren't all mummies supposed to have a curse? Where are the mysterious deaths? The economic failures? The horrible diseases? It can't possibly be a real mummy without those!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
OK, who wins the fight between this guy and the Scorpion King?
Akenathon Gates went in a trip to the past to hunt dinosaurs. It missed and hit the wrong dinossaur with the Riffle Mummifier (Windows inside) and left it there without telling anyone. When they went back to the present, well, you know, the Twin Piramids that resisted the planes transformed in the Twin Towers that not, we lost the time travel and all memory of that great time line.
The last thing I knew about Akenathon is that he changed his name to William and lives near Redmond.
From the article:
"The pollen from its stomach also shows that the environment was too wet for much desiccation to take place before burial."
Whoah! The dinosaurs buried their dead?!?
All right!
Now we can extract the DNA and play Jurrasic-Park.
I'm quite successful ever since I created Simone. She's the perfect date for geeks:
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
...when fish decided to find a place to ride bicycles
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
That would require that humans were around with the dinosours... dosn't that screw up somebodies theory?
WU'BO - A word with absolutely no meaning of any kind.
Would this mean I get to spend my after life with dinosuars?
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Whoa ease up there Tonto. I don't think anyone forced you to read this article did they? Lay off the Jolt Cola and get some rest.
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
maybe this will solve the scientific question about what color were the dinosaurs skin? They have speculated everything from purple to green.
It works for me. 1.2b windoze version on Win2K Advanced Server.
Using my scientific skepticism: How exactly does a mummy stay preserved without being fractured and destroyed for 77 million years? That's a very, very, very long time. I'm really curious because that doesn't really make sense to me.
Hmm, I saw this on video a while ago. It was pretty interesting, unfortunatly i don't know of any online references to this. try google.
Fuck off peabrain...
A Dinosaur
Haven't you figured it out yet? Critical thinking is NOT allowed on Slashdot. Just accept what we say, and don't ask questions.
You will tow the party line or get ridiculed and insulted and your karma beaten with a wet hose. Kabish? Else we have to killyounow. Badda-bing!
(The parent post has the ratings: Flamebait=1 ?!?, Troll=1, Overrated=4, and a few positives.)
To date, we can't say for sure that they are human tracks. See here.
Not exactly. It was long ago determined that we cannot say for sure what caused the tracks. Basically, though, creationists have ceded the issue. Unfortunately, you will continue to see apologists who didn't "get the memo" or who refuse to believe it. Just point them to the link above and hope that that will suffice for a response.
It was long ago determined that we cannot say for sure what caused the tracks.
Yes, but one can be reasonably sure they weren't caused by a man.
Basically, though, creationists have ceded the issue.
But creationists still cite them as evidence, even those associated with the ICR (honesty never being one of their strong points).
Yet Another Web Site
Over the course of 77 MILLION years, you better believe that the sediment deposition rate is constant. Why? Just look at the math:
using 40,000yrs as a base with radiocarbon dating, you can figure out what the rate of deposit for a region is in the past 40,000 years in mm/yr.
total_deposit (mm) =
deposit_per_year(mm/yr)* 7.7x10^6 (years)
The fact that the rate of deposit is so small corresponding to the number of years means that you can indeed treat a total sediment deposit as if it were averaged.
Think before you post please.
Thank you, the Logic Police will be leaving now.
There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/10 10_021010_dinomummy.html
~A'Ëq'i4d)^'$ÊSÈòB
"Blast from the Past" and "George of the Jungle".
:).
Where Brendan plays a guy suddenly dragged into modern civilisation with a permanently bemused/dopey expression on his face.
Wait a minute, that's Encino Man.
Never mind