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Scientists Find Soft Tissue in T-Rex Fossil
douglips writes "Reuters is running a story about a shocking development in paleontology: A T-Rex thigh bone fossil was reluctantly broken to fit in a transport helicopter, and inside soft tissue was found. It appears to include blood vessels and bone cells. Scientists hope to isolate proteins, and perhaps even DNA."
Let the cloning begin!
Great! No need to muck around with extracting blood from mosquitoes in amber and what not.
Where's Jeff Goldblum when you need him?
just curious.
Now we know that when the cloned T-Rex escapes, if you stand perfectly still it won't see you!
hail our new cloned-DNA T-rex overlor-*CHOMP*
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Now this is news. I know we are not gonna get any cool theme parks out of this, but this is pretty cool stuff.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
If I said it once, I've said it a thousand times...
Modern helicopters are just too small!
This is not the first identification of soft protein laden tissue that has been extracted from dinosaur tissue as Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University has extracted these tissues from other tissues as well, so there is a precedent.
Of course getting actual DNA from these tissues will be a long shot due to its fragile nature, but protein sequence may prove very informative in letting us define exactly where genetic lineages have gone over evolution.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
mmm, soup!
after all, earth is only 6000 years old and was created in 40 days, unless my sources are wrong
We can check for traces of tar, nicotine and other toxins, and scientists will get to end the extinction debate. Seriously, might this be the biggest news of the decade? Longer?
Looks good for your age..
I'm sorry, but why did they have to put it inside a transport helicoptor? Couldn't they just have attached a tether or something?
[o]_O
for the theatrical release of Jurassic Park 9
and the real question everyone wants answered is...
does it taste like chicken?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It was a book by Michael Crichton before Spielberg decided to ruin it on the big screen.
I'm slightly skeptical. The article talks about soft tissue, but none of the scientists even try to explain how soft tissue could have survived for seventy million years?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
Is this the first soft tissue find of a dinosaur?
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
instead of mindlessly breaking open rare fossils looking for soft tissue as suggested by Dr. Schweitzer?
those damn SUVs better watch out. Yeah, who owns the road now %^*@$!
It'll be interesting to see if we can find hominid remains in similar states of preservation, so we can learn more about the layout of our evolutionary tree. Then again, a T-Rex bone is huge, and that may be the only reason it managed to keep anything preserved.
Yes, The Whale's Vagina has once again steered clear from any and all harm! Just as long as California doesn't split off from the U.S. anytime soon...
Anybody got a handy chaos theorist? Anybody? Seriously, I need a chaos theorist, oily hair, glasses, fuzzy math skills, preferably debauched.
Alternatively do any of you know anything about UNIX systems?
"Scientists Find Kleenex Tissue in T-Rex Bone"... and thought "those damn litter pigs"!
Homer: He may be rich, but money can't buy everything!
Marge: Like what?
Homer: . . . A Dinosaur!
I want to be the first 35 year old kid on my block with a T-Rex. Leash laws be damned!
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
We can clone secret t-rex weapons and release them on fueding countries to settle wars! ...
Or we could just open a theme park, go visit, and get killed.
Just remember that he can't see you if you don't move.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -Alan Kay
They're now so busy figguring out if they could that they are forgetting to figgure out if they should.
Why would a T-Rex be using Kleenex?
Hello?... Is this thing on?
If it is in one, it is quite possible for it to be in others. I just wonder if it can be done in a none destructive manner?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Nope, you could even haven taken the time to punctuate...
I wonder if this soft tissue will give us some clues about the metabolism of T-Rex, namely will it reveal whether it was warm or cold blooded, or something in between. I must admit this is surprising news.
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
Yay! Now we can make the future of Xenozoic Tales (aka "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs") a reality...
>;k
meaty goodness
in my professional paleontological opinion (not), it needs a nice marinade
fre up the BBQ, lets see what T Rex tastes like
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
WHY did it have to be the DNA of a T-Rex? Why couldn't it have been a nice herbivore, like a stegosaurus, or even better, one of those little chicken-sized dinos?
Now there's going to be running and screaming, and it's all going to be a big huge mess.
Technoli
What if it wasn't a T-Rex. What if it was porcine?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm a little concerned about the possible viruses which may have been dormantly sitting in this soft tissue all along. Who knows what they might be/do?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
article here
Let the cloning begin! ...
Eh.
Mmmm... It -does- taste like chicken. If you can imagine 10,000 year-old chicken getting better with age.
Now if I can just find a 10,000 year-old White Zin to go with it...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
"Paleontologists forced to break the creature's massive thighbone to get it on a helicopter..."
Who was heading this team, Homer Simpson?
I can just see him now:
Homer: "Grrr..."
Lisa: "Dad, it's just too big to fit in there."
Homer: "Nonsense Lisa, daddy will just shove it in....Grrr....here it goes...." *snap* "...DOH!"
Sugapablo
Bone cells are not soft tissue. Maybe unfossilized tissue, but even unfossilized bone is not considered soft tissue.
You say you want a revolution....
Could blood cells, blood vessels, etc. last in a flexible state for 70 million years?
I kind'a doubt it.
Is this proof of a young earth?
Dodgson, we've got Dodgson here!
mmmm... prehistoric prions
*yawn*
Modes of fossil preservation:
Soft part preservation - Soft tissues are preserved only under exceptional conditions. Examples include preservation of Siberian Mammoths (freezing in permafrost), Pleistocene cave faunas and older mummified remains (dessication), and insects and small animals preserved in lithified tree sap (amber). Soft parts can also be preserved after being replaced by minerals.
Original hard parts - Resistant materials such as calcium, silica, and calcium phosphate are sometimes preserved as original hard parts in shells, bones, and teeth.
Recrystallized hard parts - It is common, however, for original hard parts to be altered during diagenesis and after lithification. Unstable minerals such as aragonite will recrystallize to a more stable form such as calcite. Mineral crystals within an organism's hard parts my regrow to become larger and consolidated. Often recrystallization destroys fine, internal detail within a fossil.
Carbonization - Organic-laden hard parts and soft parts can be preserved as a thin film of organic carbon. This occurs when the organic material is preserved undecayed through burial. As heat increases throughout burial the volitile components of the organic material (N, O, H, and S) are driven off leaving a thin film of black carbon behind.
Replacement - Chemical reactions that occur during diagenesis can result in the molecule by molecule replacement of mineral for mineral or mineral for organic tissue. Replacement can often preserve exquisite detail in fossils.
Silicification - replacement of calcite by silica.
Pyritization - replacement of calcite or soft tissues with pyrite
Phosphatization - replacement of low phosphate apatite with high phosphate apatite.
Permineralization - Porous organic structures such as wood and bone are often preserved by the mineral infilling of the pore spaces. A common way of 'petrifying' wood and dinosaur bone.
Source
-----------
It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues. I googled this phenomenon and there seems to be a rather broad definition for "soft tissue". Soft Tissue, it appears, can be preserved in many ways (see above). I'm curious as to how this tissue survived micro-organisms, mineralization/calcification, carbonization, or simply, or even dehydration. How was it able to remain soft enough to be squeezed?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
from the article:
"Horner said he hoped museums around the world would start cracking open bones and looking for soft tissue in their fossils."
Is there something wrong with this statement?
I suppose that if the current research on this tissue proves promising, then such a bold statement as the aforementioned would hold some water.
But seriously, going around cracking open dinosaur bones?
Hmmm....maybe I'm just skeptical.
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
It would go hang with Hawaii. ..Alaska can come, too.
There is a rather better write-up of this awesome story on MNSBC, including some rather shocking pictures. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
As soon as the bone was broken, one smart ass scientist said: "Hey, this is T-Rex DNA! I know T-Rex DNA!"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
First, I think we'll definately see cloned dinosaurs, mammoth, etc within out lives. What I think will surprise people will be the economic pusher for this.
Sure, researchers will pioneer the basic technology, but the people who do the large scale cloning won't be theme park owners, scientists, or preservationists.
They'll be food producers.
We're at the top of the foodchain, and foods like Fugu (deadly blowfish), sushi, and... well, many asian dishes, prove that we're running out of new stuff to eat. There are amazing strides being made by cooks, and there are only so many things people can try before they die of old age, but more and more people are getting adventuresome and want to eat things that nobody else has.
Enter: The brontoburger.
Who here hasn't salivated at the thought of carving into a big old dinosaur steak? Who here can forget the longing eyes they cast on Fred Flintstone's car as it tipped over under the weight of the massive dino-ribs he had just ordered?
Predictions:
1. Herbivores of various types will be bred in captivity for their meat and leather.
2. The rich will beat a path to their doorstep for the exclusivity of eating prehistoric food.
3. In an almost defiant gesture of the universe, the meat will undoubtedly taste like chicken. Dinosaurs are, after all, big ol' birds by most reckoning.
You may laugh now, but when you're cleaning the last bit of Tony Romas Olde Fashioned Allosaurus (like grandpa used to make 'em) Ribs, remember where you heard it first. Or second, or whenever this message drifted across your desk.
Is that because Spielberg wasn't sure how to spell "Tyrannosaurus"?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
"Horner said he hoped museums around the world would start cracking open bones and looking for soft tissue in their fossils." Oh yes, that's a great idea. I can see it now... Dinosaur exhibits around the world all simultainiously close and hardware stores sell out of sledge hammers as museum curiators go smashing about in the exhibits in hopes of finding the holy grail of dino DNA. There goes the neighborhood!
... for a second I thought I clicked on the "Slashdot Story Generator" by mistake!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Either way, if it really is that big why don't they just hang half of it out the back with a tied on red flag. I think that's all the DOT requires.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
To quote Robin Williams, "Could Genesis be a metaphor for the Big Bang? 'No, gawd jus' went click.'"
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
...looking for soft tissue.
Yeah...that's it. Soft tissue!"
~Some panic-stricken teenager caught in a museum after hours with a can of spraypaint and a baseball bat.
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
Stephen Spielberg would never lie to us!
Now I'm just waiting for the aliens to arrive...
i think cloning a t-rex is a great idea, even if its killed at birth or sometime during its adolescense, this would prove an invaluable opportunity to answer all the questions people have had about dinosaurs. But i wonder how all the "bible thumpers" who are so against cloning of normal animals, will react to the prospect of reviving a 65 million year old creature. i say, clone it... watch it... kill it... and look at what you've got. its too good of an opportunity to pass on. not to mention the revenue a zoo can generate with this thing on display
Bush didn't outlaw stem cell research, he just eliminated government funding of new lines.
So what does T-Rex taste like?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
In this case, the acidity is unlikely to be a factor, but the totally anaerobic conditions may be. It is possible that any bacteria in the soft tissue simply didn't have what they needed in order to consume the organic material, and therefore didn't. A slight variant on the situation with peat, but essentially the same idea.
A second option - less likely, but possible - would be a variant on the way fresh produce is kept fresh today. Modern food isn't always kept with preservatives. Rather, the packaging company uses a medium blast from a radioactive caesium isotope. This kills off all of the bacteria present.
Radioactive materials certainly occur naturally, and there are indeed cases of naturally-occuring nuclear reactors. It is entirely within the realms of possibility that natural radioactivity kept the inside of the bones sterilized, so that organic decay could not take place.
The odds of that being the case are slim, but not quite none. However, it raises questions on what may be found in areas where such preservation techniques may actually have occured.
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)
What scares me is that the second post is a reply to the first one...
Holding the bloody evidence up for all to see and to know that Intelligence was what set us apart from every other living thing but doomed to be the one most ignored.
Maybe we should fry the bloody thing and serve it to Falwell and his cronies..
Rapid Nirvana
You'd have to demonstrate a use. There's a lot of companies who patented huge swathes of the human genome who are having those patents methodically overturned when it was discovered that 1)they didn't know what they were patenting and 2) they had no use for it then, anyway.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Let's just hope that the material is not wasted. Recovery of complete DNA would require using very large amounts of damaged DNA. It's like fixing a RAID array that uses mirroring, with lots of mirrors and lots of data loss.
This is really just a phony press release to increase interest in the next Jurassic Park movie!
Finally we can go tell people all the years of preparing for these evil beast is over! Let's go hunt everyone of them before they eat our children and turn into terrorists!
...they broke Marc Bolan apart and found soft tissue inside?
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
"All the more evidence of your vegetative state: You can't spell S-C-H-I-A-V-O."
Maybe too much of the brain has already been consumed...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
If I'm being chased by a T-Rex... (or any other beastie intent on eating me) I don't have to be a fast runner to get away.
I just have be faster than YOU.
I have no problems believing this is the first time a male paleontoligist has located `soft tissue`...
...the NRA. They have never looked as attractive as they do today...
The obligitory Matrix Quote
"We're gonna need Guns...Lots of Guns"
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
Doctor I have tested and re-tested the carbon dating of this tyranosaurus bone, It doesnt actually seem to be Seventy Million years old.
Acyually it seems to keepcoming up as 2 weeks ol.... (CHOMP!! CRUNCH!! GULP!!) *ROAR!*
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I suspect there will be a whole lotta bone smashing going on....
You missed the joke.
What intrests me the most here is if this can help prove the T-rex in fact are mutch younger then science now belive. Perhaps earth realy isn't that old, anyway?
Mabye someone is cloning dinosaurs, and these people's dig, is the mad scientist's landfill?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
The scientist in the article wants more scientists to start cracking open their own T-rex bones to see if they have soft tissue inside as well. I'm wondering, isn't there a way to tell what's inside *apart* from cracking open precious bones? Ultrasound, or an MRI, maybe?
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I mean, if we're going to goof around with the genetics just to get this thing born, why stop there?
"T-Rex with freakin' LASER BEAMS on their heads..."
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
It was all the formaldehyde in cigarette smoke. Gary Larson proved this long ago.
T-rex T-bone steak. Very rare.
Looks great on a restaurant's menu.
Yeah, it seems so.
Interestingly enough, Schweitzer (who is conducting the study), has done previous work on "dino blood" that has been "re-manufactured" by certain creationists to case-in-point their side of the coin:l ood.htm l
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/b
I scanned the article, but didn't see any reference to dates... the Museum of the Rockies mentions they finished their Hells Creek T-rex dig just recently, and that this particular specimen was excavated 2001-2003(search MOR1125 )... So, when was this bad boy dropped? When did the 'soft tissue' analysis occur?
and now back to the fallout shelter...
It still had the name Jurassic Park and it still involved DNA.
Would anyone be surprised by an article titled "Bones Found in T-Rex Fossil"?
When a dog saves it's owners life by waking him up and getting him out of a burning house, then later takes a dump on the lawn while the firefighters are putting out the fire, does the headline say "Dog Saves Master, Takes Dump"?
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I'm not sure if it's your reply or my cloning of the first post, but now my head hurts...
Eh.
Got a link for that? Because that has got to be the worst thing I've ever heard. We could have gotten DNA from that for sure.
What does this do to the presumed age of the fossil? The article is unclear, here. Is this fossilized soft tissue, or actual preserved soft tissue? If the tissue is simply preserved, then there is no way that bone can be 70 million years old or even 100,000 years old.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I go by the 5 epoch rule, so it should still be good, no?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
Now just watch.
Now just watch. People will clone Tyrannosaurs, and they'll turn out to be cute-colored, friendly carrion eaters.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Perhaps they can use potassium-40 dating, or some other method to directly measure the age of the soft tissue, rather than the traditional method of estimating age by the surrounding rock.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
is approximately when DNA becomes junk. It doesn't matter whether you can extract DNA or not, because even under ideal conditions DNA degrades so anything you manage to recover will be nonsensical and useless. We will never, repeat never, be able to clone anything as old as T. rex.
Jurasic Park and the idiot that wrote it have a lot to answer for when it comes to my annoyance and stress levels!
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
You were there, were you? Maybe you can explain something to me. How long was the first day? Where did the building materials come from? Doesn't it take crazier faith if you claim the universe spontaneoulsy came into existence and assembled itself in such a way as to have intelligent life, without containing the intelligence in the first place? (i.e. Things getting more organized over time into complex biological systems all by themselves). That flies in the face of the law of entropy, which says basically that stuff left to itself gradually falls apart and becomes more disorganized and more random over time. It takes effort to keep things running.
Try Again.
Sounds more like dino osso buco.
Someone please Mod Redundant. Thanks.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Everyone keeps hearing "dinosaur dna" and thinking "cloning". That seems like a bit of a long shot. And I think concentrating on this is overlooking the real value here.
If they find any dinosaur DNA just think of what could be done with that. Mostly what I'm thinking about here is ancestry analysis. Our understanding of the exact way evolutionary processes have behaved contains much that is based on similarity and guesswork. It seems if we could get solid information on what now-living organisms that dinosaurs were related to and to what extent-- or what dinosaurs were related to each other and how, if more soft tissue can be found in other fossils-- it seems this could verify science's understanding of paleobiology (sic?) and the evolutionary tree, or change it, in an unprecedented way. Has anything of this sort-- DNA from living tissue that old-- ever been found before, has there ever been any comparable way we have been able to perform genetic testing on a sample of that age?
This is even aside from what that DNA and any found proteins can tell us about how dinosaurs looked and behaved...
This is a really big deal.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Picture Here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4379577. stm
Bart: Principal Skinner? Um, I'm real sorry about
my dog getting you fired, and biting you, and then getting it
on with your leg.
Skinner: Well...maybe it was for the best. Now I...I finally have time
to do what I've always wanted: write the great American novel.
Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are
brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call
it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus."
Apu: Oh, you have _got_ to be kidding sir. First you think of an
idea that has already been done. Then you give it a title
that nobody could possibly like. Didn't you think this
through...
[later]...was on the bestseller list for eighteen months!
Every magazine cover had...
[later]...most popular movies of all time, sir! What were
you thinking?! [realizing] I mean, thank you, come again.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to *closed* systems. This creationist "argument" was torn apart as soon as it was uttered.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
For those who don't know, the parent linked to the graphic for an old 80's Far Side cartoon, by Gary Larson.
The original caption states: The real reason dinosaurs became extinct.
Had that on my wall for many, many years. Still cracks me up.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
* Points at the sun. * Effort.
The universe is getting more disorganized. The planet is not because it's being pumped full of relatively non-deadly radiation all the time.
As far as faith goes: faith is idiotic. It exists for the sole purpose of allowing the weak to live without facing the unknown. I believe only what can be concretely proven which, in the non-mundane garbage-gets-picked-up-on-tuesday sense, is jack shit. Humans do not, and will not exist as a species long enough to understand the truth behind the origins of this universe. In the cosmic sense, we're no smarter than the bacteria.
Actually, I do believe one thing: pure cynicism is the highest form of enlightenment.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Really ;-).
:-| did it?
Cheers
Adolfo
Re-read your post and replace any reference of "dinosaurs lived with tool-using humans" with "evolution is fact".
Many people believe in evolution without proving it to themselves. Just food for thought.
However,
Have I been laid? I'll have to ask my girlfriend about that when she gets home.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Ahh. This just proves that Evolution is BS, and that the earth is not hundreds of millions of years old. It is just a couple of thousand years old. Soft tissue could have lasted that long. In your FACE scientists. The dinosaurs were obviously killed in the crusades because they were dumb animals that didn't believe in Jesus. Duh.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As it happens, we have a huge source of increasing entropy to drive our tiny localized decreases in entropy: the sun.
Entropy is also an observation, not a fundamental law. We observe that one spot in spacetime has low entropy, and entropy increases as we travel away from that point in time.
If you pull out of your viewpoint embedded in your local perception of spacetime, and look at all of the universe through history more like a single static object, you'd see that there's simply a boundary condition at one point with low entropy, and another boundary condition (possibly at infinity) with high entropy. That's not necessarily all that strange or confusing; certainly it's less confusing than explaining how your "intelligent designer" came about itself.
The typical response: "We're not supposed to understand how the intelligent designer got there!" explains nothing. It's a copout; a dead-end for the intellectually lazy who would rather say that all the answers they need have been conveniently put into a pamphlet for them. That's fine for you. The rest of us will keep working on finding real answers.
BTW, the upshot of evolution is that the biosphere gets more diverse over time. Start with just one species, all nice and orderly, and it becomes a mess as the centuries go by. Very complex organisms are just a byproduct of an ever-broader distribution of random solutions to the problem of staying alive.
Evolution is not some march towards complexity (despite many high-school biology teachers being confused about this). It's a process where the collection of species becomes more disorganized and more random over time. That means, for any characteristic (size, complexity, speed of travel, etc) you'll see a growth in the diversity of that characteristic amoung all species over time.
Flip 10 coins - how many were heads? Keep doing it once per hour. As time goes on, you'll eventually see 7 heads, then 8, then 9 , then 10. Not becuase any force is directing the random coinflips, but because you're simply getting enough random tries to see the outliers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> you fat assed twits seriously need a good solid invasion and a couple of centuries
> occupation. It will do you the world of good.
We had it, but in 1776 we corrected the problem.
Solzhenitsyn describes such an incident in The Gulag Archipelago. In his account, its a prison work gang who finds the mamoth and immediately begin digging it out of the ice and eating it. He used the story to illustrate the desperate condition of the gulags. No idea whether there's any truth to it.
"It's all Oooh and Ahhh, now, but just wait until the screaming begins later..."
If they clone a T-rex, don't they have to clone Jeff Goldblume, too?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I dunno, we found a teenage girl that beat 3 robots at arm wrestling and a cute high school dropout self-taught chip designer so now I believe anything is possible on /.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I picked just absolutely the worst possible week to re-read Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness", didn't I?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
At least according to the creationist museum.
Everyone knows these "dinosaur" fossils were put there by Satan to cast doubt on the creation of the world, 6,000 years ago.
This isn't the first instance that soft tissue of a prehistoric animal has been found. There have been many discoveries of frozen mastodons, and even some attempts to clone them, but no successes that I've heard of.
I'm sure cloning/breeding a mastodon is a trivial matter compared to cloning an 70 million year old animal that has no relative species alive today to use as surrogate mothers. So, I'm not expecting to ride on a tethered T-rex at the state fair anytime soon.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Great, now he's missed three jokes. Stop making the poor man feel bad.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I nominate this story for rocking so hardcore.
Any seconds?
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
There are lot of exotic meats available right now but not many people seem interested in eating it. A little bison ranching. Some raise ostriges. But there doesn't seem to be much demand for roo-steaks. I'm sure the Ausies would be eager to capitalize on it if there were. Go to Africa and, with the exception of a few restuarants cateringly exlusively to tourists, you won't find antelope or wildebeast on the menu.
For the most part, I think few are really interesting in trying exotic foods. It's really about radicaly different preparation. There is little demand of new meats that aren't very similar to existing meats. Not much demand for new vegitables that aren't similar to existing vegetables. The new exotic new foods that have been successful have gone the route of either being healthier or easier/cheaper to produce. I can't guess about the health benefits of eating dinosaur but I can't imagine raising them would be cheap.
But who wants to pay $65,000 for a dinosaur embryo that you can't breed new little dinosaurs with?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Soft dinosaur tissue would be interesting if that's what it really is, but here's a quote from today's Science journal:
"Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, cautions
that looks can deceive: Nucleated protozoan cells have been found in
225-million-year-old amber, but geochemical tests revealed that the
nuclei had been replaced with resin compounds. Even the resilience of
the vessels may be deceptive. Flexible fossils of colonial marine
organisms called graptolites have been recovered from
440-million-year-old rocks, but the original material--likely
collagen--had not survived."
Now should be the time to start a campaign to raise public awareness of the consequences of giving cloned T-Rex's as Christmas presents. Many will be abandoned after the Christmas period, usually about the time the pet dog goes missing. Pedestrians will need to be extra vigilant. There may even be a crisis in the cattle industry. (One good consequence should be less stray cats.) People should think more carefully before giving such a fad present.
the BIBLE talks about dinosaurs. they are specifically mentioned in the early books of the bible.
Specifically, many Christian creationists believe that tanniyn (translated "dragon"), b@hemowth ("behemoth" or "brachiosaur") and livyathan ("leviathan" or "kronosaur") were Hebrew names for dinosaur-sized creatures, as explained here.
If there are any big studio executives who read /. regularly (and haven't hung themselves already from the groupthink), I bet they're thinking 'Damn, now I wish we had made Jurassic Park 4'.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
OK. Point taken, but you do realize just how LONG 70 million years is? even a TWO MILLIONTHs of a percent degradation PER YEAR would result in total desctruction of the sample.
What if the Dinosaur screamed "no dna degradation zone!" right before he died?
you've never played calvin-ball, have you?
pfft. prolly don't believe in Santa, either.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
here is an article that goes a bit more in depth about the theory.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
Remember the gardener in 3001? I dont remember if it was a T Rex or Raptor but I want one. A remarkably high scoring set of comments to this article. Now what do I do with my MOD points?
I saw the movie.
I think I know how this is going to end.
Bet this
Are they nuts?? What kind of hurry do they have to be in to break a freakin' T-Rex bone...
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
*cell phone rings* Oh CRA-
Of course this backs Biblical Creation.
This fossil was apparently 70 million years old and found embedded in sandstone.
For an account of dating problems with another sandstone fossil, see:
In 1984, I was on a geological excursion in Mägenwil (Switzerland). I collected some sandstone samples with fossilized mussels in it...
To see how quickly sandstone fossils can form, see the latest 'Creation' print magazine by the publishers of that website. It shows they can form in a few decades. The pictures shows several such 'recent fossils' found by kids on a beach - bits of glass cemented together with sand, even a car's gearbox cemented into sandstone.
I'm under the impression that man did not live during the same period as T-Rex. Therefore, why should we believe we are immune to any viruses during the T-Rex time period as mankind was never introduced to them?
This is likely beyond current technology and biology, since according to my understanding work on the human proteome has only just begun, but what if a group of molecular biologists were to get together and fill in the gaps? For instance, once we understand the way that bone structure is encoded, they would deduce that such a massive creature would need a particular density of bone, etc.
Arguably the resultant creature would not be a Tyrannosaurus rex as it existed 65 million years ago, but it might be the world's greatest biological hack.
and
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
They are banning pitbull dogs in some cities here in Canada, I hope the former owners of the dogs aren't considering a T-rex instead!
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to *closed* systems. This creationist "argument" was torn apart as soon as it was uttered.
I guess we'll see if the universe is a "closed" system then.
BTW - You are a man of greater leaps of faith than me. Unfathomable.
Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request, and that is to have T-rexes with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now, evidently, my cycloptic colleague informs me that that can't be done. Can you remind me what I pay you people for? Honestly, throw me a bone here!
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
* Points at the sun. * Effort.
That's just energy. It doesn't put things together in an organizational way.
faith is idiotic.
I think you are referring to "blind" faith. Like delusional ideas about oneself. The most common one seems to be: "what I can comprehend is the limit of all truth"
Actually, I do believe one thing: pure cynicism is the highest form of enlightenment.
Generally, the idea that cynicism and intelligence are directly proportional is true. But, this only applies to "mental" gymnastics. There are other facets to our reality - one cannot be cynical about love or beauty, or one finds oneself pretty dang cold, lonely, and bitter in this world of ours.
The rest of us will keep working on finding real answers.
Go for it! Just don't make an assumption and stick to it to the death. Stay focused on finding the truth.
"Seek and Ye Shall Find"
"So, I'm not expecting to ride on a tethered T-rex at the state fair anytime soon."
Well, just in case they do get it working, and you want to give the T-rex a treat afterward, remember to keep your palms flat.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
biosphere gets more diverse over time
Evolution doesn't work. There are no examples, no known mutations have caused a jump between one species and a new "incompatible" species. Who's making leaps of faith now? Stating that evolution is a fact (or saying it's true) is not scientific.
If you have access to science magazine, the original article is already up on their website. There are some amazing pictures.
Article: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/571 7/1952
Commentary: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/571 7/1852b
except the creator is not in the system. otherwise he/she/it would be scientifically provable. you don't take into account "god" when making calculations.
How ever you spell that. The genetic code is not even interpreted the same in all species, so it's possible that such an aincient animals DNA would not produce the right stuff in a more modern cell. But then I'm no biologist and this difference may occur even further back than dinos. Just wanted to dump a little more water on the blanket.
Nope, you could even haven taken the time to punctuate...
Apparently that doesn't matter. This guy posted it with no punctuation 34 minutes after I did, yet he's +5 funny and I'm -1 redundant. Wha?
I guess it's because he replied to an earlier post and I posted original, so the mods reading threaded see him first. To show how much I care, I'll post this without even subtracting my karma bonus and likely losing 3 more points. I probably deserve losing 6 karma points for posting that line, anway. I for one welcome my threaded-reading timestamp ignoring overlords.
No, you're just a man of lesser education than he.
Wut FR
This OBVIOUSLY points to the fact that the dinosaurs really did die off 5000 years ago!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If you're going to argue Young Earth, atleast get your facts right. Don't regurgitate something that you don't fully understand.
2nd law of thermodynamics applies to CLOSED systems only. The SUN is giving us energy, so Earth by itself is not closed, it is GAINING energy. LIFE uses this to energy to power complex chemical machinery.
Also, as far as "entropy == disorganized" goes.. This is a false statement as well. A lot of text books, including science, state it this way as an analogy, but when you get to the actual definition, it refers to loss of USABLE energy.
In other words: You can't create a perpetual motion machine - there is energy "wasted" in every conversion. Eventually you run out of used, captured, energy in the system.
but when you talked about drinking White Zinfandel, your ignorance was confirmed... ;)
Would sir like to smell the box nipple?
Scientists find soft tissue in T-rex?
It wasn't the Puffs greasy kind was it? I hate those. I'd rather have a good raw, red nose than use those things!
Why Vegan? No other food choice has a farther-reaching and more profoundly positive impact on all of life on Earth.
We can also use the leftover bones from the dino dinners to produce oil. We can currently convert chicken bones and other trash into petroleum, but dinosaur bones are huge and would probably yield more of the black stuff.
One problem, even if it were feasible to clone a T-Rex (which mostly likely it isn't) there is the tiny fact that dinosaurs at the time lived in a higher oxygenated atmosphere. This made it possible for them to grow as large as they did.
-Steve
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
That reduces the required timeframe from a few million years to somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours. However, then, you'd have to explain why the dinosaur was in that exact area at that exact time.
Like I said before, I think it extremely unlikely that radiation played a role in this case. Unlikely but not impossible. The geologists and paleantologists involved don't seem to have a clear idea on how organic material could survive at all within fossilised material, so I think it would be unwise to completely rule out any option at this point, although that doesn't mean all options are equally likely. Being careful at this point seems sensible.
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)
Yes, I did make a mistake in my post with the the spelling of Brontosaurus but my point was the Brontosaurus did not exist. It was a mistake / hoax, call it what you will. So the species did not exist. Google for Brontosaurus Here and here explain thing rather well.
That's just energy. It doesn't put things together in an organizational way.
actually, that exactly what energy can and does do.
This is the link to the actual news release. (I study at NC State ;-))
http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/05_03/075. htm
Shaah!
Hey, finally, my .sig is relevant to my post!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Bet you it's an April Fool's joke from the April issue of Science.
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss." - Douglas Adams
So, did he have allergies? And how could he use tissues with those scrawny forearms?
C'mon, she's a nerd girl, she automatically gets a bonus for that. She's got nice legs. And archaeological digs tend to be out in the middle of nowhere and last for months and months with no other stimulation...what would you think then? Darn right.
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Lab analysis reveals that that the soft tissue was a Chicken McNugget dropped by a site worker eating his lunch.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Solzhenitsyn describes such an incident in The Gulag Archipelago. In his account, its a prison work gang who finds the mamoth and immediately begin digging it out of the ice and eating it. He used the story to illustrate the desperate condition of the gulags. No idea whether there's any truth to it.
T.rex ated other dinasaurs.
omicronish: "For years I thought all UNIX systems had cool graphical UIs like [in Jurrasic Park], and then I tried a real one and was disappointed by these crazy things called "characters"."
Queer Boy: "In the late 90s IRIX did have a graphical menu that was similar to that."
That would be the "3D File System Navigator", or FSN. It's still around, as is SGI, at least for now. This page tells about it and has some screenshots:
http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html
I played with it on the Ingdio 2 we had in the lab at Unnamed Univerity. Pretty useless, but fun for a few minutes.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If its possible to pull off, a cloned dino would finally put to rest the debate on if dinos were birds or reptiles once and for all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ob simpsons ref:
"lisa! in this house, we RESPECT the laws of thermodynamics!"
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
to jurassic park!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Energy entering a closed system can and does reverse entropy. It depends on the enthalpy and the temperature. Google for "energy entropy enthalpy" and read the first few hits. In particular, learn Gibb's Free Energy equation; it neatly describes the relationship between energy, entropy and enthalpy.
It just goes to show, you can't make a dinosaur without breaking legs.
Thanks, everybody. I'll be here all night. Don't forget to tip your waitress.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
No, evolution is a fact. The effect has been observed in bacteria and in some insects. The reason it has been observed in those living creatures is because they have extremely short reproductive cycles. That means in the past 100 years we have observed new species that are significantly different from their ancestors and better suited to their environment. A very simple example is certain bacteria that have evolved to become more resistant to antibiotics.
Evolution is also a theory. How can evolution be both fact and theory? It is a matter of context. Although evolution itself is a fact, there are many explanations that try to explain the mechanisms of evolution. Those explanations are collectively the theories of evolution. The best known theory of evolution is called Natural Selection. Another theory of evolution is that humans, apes and chimpanzees have evolved from a common ancestor. That's often the theory that gets the fundamentalists upset.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote a rather good essay he called Evolution as Fact and Theory. He describes all this far more eloquently and precisely than I have here. It should be mandatory reading for anybody who says evolution is not a fact, even educated people like yourself who do understand that evolution is a valid theory.
We already have. It's called the sun. You know, the bright yellow disk in the sky that revolves around the earth.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
So you're saying that if T-Rexs couldn't see inanimate objects then they would have become extinct long ago?
or else!
I realize you are an ASU student, so you probably know your dinosources better than most people on Slashdot. Toss aside the old bone of "countless millions of years" for a minute: any chance this guy (well, they did say it was a large femur) was just loitering around for way too long? I mean, sandstone, formed by water, come on, there's no way it wasn't replaced with minerals....
Archaeologists around the world are in tears as hundreds of children steal dinosaur fossils from local museums. When interviewed, one child responded, "I wanna see how many licks it takes to get to the center of a dinosaur bone. Duh." What's next for the insides of fossils? Interior decoration?
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
Cue the John Williams music... and that cute little tutorial animation they had in the movie with the southern "dino-sars" guy narrating.
But I digress... I'll never forget what a friend of mine said after we saw the movie together:
"I wasn't impressed with the special effects. But the dinosaur training was awesome."
RP
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
Don't regurgitate.
:-P
2nd law of thermodynamics applies to CLOSED systems only. The SUN is giving us energy, so Earth by itself is not closed, it is GAINING energy. LIFE uses this to energy to power complex chemical machinery.
I am not talking about the earth only. I am talking about the universe (the part we can touch and see: 3D + time). It is either "closed" or NOT.
Also, as far as "entropy == disorganized" goes.. blah blah blah actual definition... blah blah
I am not speaking of thermodynamics only. I am speaking of entropy in the sense of its use in information theory, but applying it to the entire system of the universe, especially as it pertains to biological systems. We'll use my analogy and not your "definition."
there is energy "wasted" in every conversion.
For a second there I thought you said conversation
We have just recently (Sydney Australia) have had our annual Easter Show (Bring the farmers to the city). One 'fast food' stall supplied a number of our native animals (including both animals on the Australian coat of Arms). This stall was packed the three times I walked past it!!! Aargh but you might be right, the clientle looked like your typical "bloody tourist".
That's just energy. It doesn't put things together in an organizational way.
actually, that exactly what energy can and does do
So if I train this laser beam on my programming workstation, it'll fix all the bugs and package it up into a self healing, learning, sentient program? Cool!
Just because other people have made "religious" issues out of their own ignorance, doesn't make every idea about God false.
And just because you don't like the idea of God, He won't go away.
...I just can't decide whether that deserves a "+1 Funny" or a "+1 Insightful"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Actually, she used to be a rather attractive girl before all of this happened to her.
I'm beginning to wish as well that they would give her body a lethal injection and have done with it.
+++ATH0
...Jericho the Fourth is only mostly wrong.
A T.Rex egg is not much larger than an ostrich egg. A newly hatched Rex is two point something inches tall. An ostrich egg has about 20x the volume of a checken egg, so it would make it a pretty memorable omelette. An ostrich could easily incubate a T Rex egg, but there might be some disagreements about the post-hatching menu hatching.
True birds have been found contemporaneously with dinosaurs of the Rex genre, so it's not looking good for the dinos-to-birds enthusiasts like Ryan at the moment.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Why is Tyro Rex no longer among us?
Let us consult the seasonal Rock Opera:
TYRO REX SUPERSAUR
OVERTURE; BIGNESS FOR OUR SIZE
GORGOS
The air is colder now - at last all too fast
I can see that we all soon will freeze
If you melt away the frost from the ground
It won't help and we still soon will freeze
Tyro! You've started to believe
The things they say of ice
You really do believe
That cold blood will suffice
And all your scaly friends
Will soon get frozen stiff
You're now moving slower than
Continental drift
Listen Tyro I don't like these cold days
All I ask is that we feel the sun's rays
And remember - we have been symbiotic all these years
Now the situation's dire
They think they never will expire
And they don't believe the snow is here
I remember when Cretaceous began
No talk of cold then - we all could get tans
And believe me - it wasn't bad when it was nice and warm
You deny the chance of death
Still we can see your frosty breath
For the glaciers have begun to form
Triassic your favorite fool should have stayed a miniscule
Like his father sucking eggs - and small hind legs
Benedicts and omelettes should be all he ever gets
He'd have left us all alone - he'd have stayed home
Listen Tyro do you care for your class?
Don't you see that this diet can't last?
We are carnosaurs - have you forgotten how hungry we are?
I am sick of eating plants
For they are often filled with ants
And they make digestion very hard
Listen Tyro it's the end of our age
Don't you see they've begun a new page
And it's sad to see our species dwindling with every hour
Now it's time for our demise
Too much bigness for our size
But it was great to be a dinosaur
Yes a dinosaur
---
The complete rock opera is posted for your edification by kind permission of the author here in the way-way-way-back machine
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
> The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to *closed* systems.
Actually the general form applies to open systems as well; it just has a term for what crosses the system's boundary.
> This creationist "argument" was torn apart as soon as it was uttered.
Yeah, if the creationist interpretation were right, the mustard seed couldn't grow into a great tree.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I am not speaking of thermodynamics only. I am speaking of entropy in the sense of its use in information theory, but applying it to the entire system of the universe, especially as it pertains to biological systems.
Do you have the faintest idea what information-theoretic entropy is?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Doesn't it take crazier faith if you claim the universe spontaneoulsy came into existence and assembled itself in such a way as to have intelligent life, without containing the intelligence in the first place?
You hardly simplify the problem by invoking a Cosmic Middle Man.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Just because other people have made "religious" issues out of their own ignorance, doesn't make every idea about God false.
And we should accept your idea and reject everyone else's, because...?
> And just because you don't like the idea of God, He won't go away.
And vice versa?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yes, yes, do deem the grinning, ducking and running included.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If we could have a go at putting monitor (or insert fave reptile here) zygotes into ostrich eggs (or insert favourite host here) starting now and using fresher zygotes, we'd be better informed about how to proceed for when we do find either a viable zygote or enough genetic material to assemble one.
Yes, I know the odds are mad-crazy against a zygote ever being found, but a week ago y'all would've said the same about recognisable T Rex marrow, wouldn't you?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If it's deep in the Pacific then it's not an island.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
...to breed one unforgettable nightmare of a terrifying ostrich?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Funny also how no matter how many chicks you throw at the problem (well... except for RAR), they can't turn on a dime... but most of them are reliably turned on by a dime - or enough dimes.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Got any other urban myths you want to mention while we're on air? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
well, in the movie they cross a trex dna and one of the frog. what if it turns out to be a trex the size of a frog ? so everyone can finally have a personal trex as a pet. at its worst it might take a bite out of your little finger :)
please provide example
Come on mods. ;-)]
This is not "off-topic" it is "funny", or at least marginally so. [like the movies
See Carry On Films for more info.
watashi wa bengoshi dewa arimasen!
Hey, I don't need a fictional being to go away. That'd be like hoping that Star Trek: Enterprise ceased to exist.
Oh, wait! The chances of God existing are roughly as good as the chances of Enterprise NOT GETTING CANCELED! I GET TO CELEBRATE TWICE!
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
On a more serious note, if their predecessors had been unable to discern immobile objects, their habit of walking into trees and straight off cliffs would have seen to it that no Tyrannysaurs happened in the first place.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
My wife and I love that song :)
geez, a whole 6% ? I feel so special !
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
>> Just because other people have made "religious" issues out of their own ignorance, doesn't make every idea about God false.
>And we should accept your idea and reject everyone else's, because...?
It's not my idea.
>> And just because you don't like the idea of God, He won't go away.
>And vice versa?
Just because you are blind, doesn't mean NO ONE can see.
You hardly simplify the problem by invoking a Cosmic Middle Man.
If you you want to twist it around, so that the Beginning and the End are called the middle...
I know God, and He really is not pissed at you. If He was, you'd be dead.
Do you have the faintest idea what information-theoretic entropy is?
My buddy Claude gave me a few pointers.
ALL arguments regarding Evolution are non-factual. Both sides can only discuss basic principles, such as the ideas of natural selection which weeds out "inferior" species.
The problem people have is that new species are not forming. And no one can give an example of a succesful mutation. The animals die, are sterile, or are not any different than their parents.
Furthermore, people who argue one one side of this issue are inconsistent in their viewpoint. If natural selection is such a great motivator - why not let the Earth be changed through the timber industry and other development. With natural selection, new species would arise and be much stronger and capable to exist in that environment. But, the Evolutionists are the same people that are against drilling in AK or fearing deforestation and spiking trees, etc.
The truth is that Evolutionists are really more anti-God than pro-science. I am pro science and pro God. But God is greater than science and always will be.
...Bubbah T. Hatfield, who assisted in loading the large bones into the helicopter, said "shore wuz a bitch gittin that big 'un on the bird. Had tah bust it in half, and I cut muhyself and bled like a stuck pig all over it. Hope duh head bitch ain't pissed or nothin' "
birds have been discovered fossilised contemporaneously with dinosaurs - ... - and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
By the same reasoning, humans live contemporaneously with primates (chimps, monkeys, etc.), and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
The religious folks do use this reasoning, usually by denying that humans are descended from chimps or monkeys. They are, strictly speaking, correct, since (contemporary) chimps and monkeys are not our ancestors. But we are primates; we share relatively recent common ancestors with other primates. Some of those common ancestors looked a lot like chimps (5 million years ago) or monkeys (20 million years ago). But they weren't (modern) chimps or (modern) monkeys, they were ancestral primates.
Similarly, tyrannosaurs were not ancestral to birds. But nobody claims that birds evolved from tyrannosaurs. The claim is that they shared a common ancestor (between 150 and 200 million years ago), and that ancestor was apparently a theropod dinosaur. It wasn't a tyrannosaur or bird; they hadn't evolved yet. The term "theropod" refers to a large branch of the dinosaur tree whose sub-branches include tyrannosaurs and birds.
It is pretty clear now from the fossil record that "birds are dinosaurs", in the same sense that "humans are primates" or "cattle are ungulates". In each case, there are still a lot of open question about the details of their evolutionary history. But the basic cladistic trees are fairly well determined.
Actually, the idea that birds are dinosaurs isn't new. It was proposed and discussed in the early 1800's. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize very well, so the usual scientific reaction was "That's interesting; can you find some more evidence?" Until the very recently, the only avian fossils from before the 65-million-year disaster were the 5 Archaeopterix fossils. Not much evidence. Then, around 1980, Chinese paleontologists discovered the Liaoning formations, full of fossils. This included the remains of lots of more birds and similar small dinosaurs. For several decades now, paleontologists have been going wild studying the confused, tangled mess of 120- to 180-million-year-old bones and trying to organize them into a consistent tree.
Of course, birds still don't fossilize very well. The debate over the details of their family tree is raging, and probably will continue for decades. But the rough outline is slowly emerging.
To learn a lot more, ask google about "Liaoning avian fossil". That'll get around 900 hits, which should keep you busy for a few weeks. Then omit the "avian", and you'll have months of' good reading on the general topic (17,700 hits right now), including the non-avian theropod dinosaurs with feather-like coverings.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
> > Do you have the faintest idea what information-theoretic entropy is?
> My buddy Claude gave me a few pointers.
Would you mind sharing the idea with us, explain how to measure it in biological systems, tell us how "getting more organized" relates to that measure, state and justify "the law of entropy", and show how "getting more organized" by the information-theoretic measure "flies in the face" of it?
Thanks in advance.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hey.. they've got the soft tissue in the bone, so
that would be some good eatin! Dinosaur Soup!
Or Carry On Moderating
Or Carry On Regardless Of We've Lost Our Sense Of Fucking Humor
I like your bit about at least marginally so, like the movies. Well done! I say, Carry On, Sir!
Infuriate left and right
Job 41; Psalm 104:26 (New International Version): ....
....
20 Smoke pours from his nostrils
as from a boiling pot over a fire of reeds.
21 His breath sets coals ablaze,
and flames dart from his mouth.
if you, or any other fools, trust those accounts, well, wahtever...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Which may explain why we use rodents for lab experiments.
Uninformed gut feeling says that all information collected by evolving immune systems is not kept forever.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Assuming evolution has a purpose or direction.
Our immune systems are not highly evolved, they are highly adapted.
Which means they are great for the current conditions in which we evolve.
If a sudden agressive external agent would threaten us, our immune system may be completely hopeless.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In South Africa an Namibia game of all kind is eaten regularly and sold in supermarkets.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Would you mind sharing the idea with us, explain how to measure it in biological systems, tell us how "getting more organized" relates to that measure, state and justify "the law of entropy", and show how "getting more organized" by the information-theoretic measure "flies in the face" of it?
How about a paraphrase of Goedel's Theorem: Truth is a superset of proof.
First, my post was in response to tunabomber's statement that the T-rex is a 70-million-year-old animal with no relative currently extant. To that assertion I replied that, to the contrary, birds are an extant relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Whether birds are descendants of theropods or relatives on a parallel lineage, I think enough evidence exists to assert that at least the minimum threshold for relation is satisfied (among the numerous similarities between birds and certain groups of dinosaurs such as the oviraptors are, for example, the presence of feathers and the furcula). While this evidence certainly does not compel the conclusion that birds descended from dinosaurs, it nonetheless strongly supports the conclusion of close relation between the two, at the very least.
Regarding your second assertion which I dispute, I further wrote that birds "are thought" to be direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird#Evolution)--howe ver, I did not state that I myself am a proponent of this theory (although I also did not state that I dispute the theory, either). I am not a paleontologist; and as a lay observer, I do not have the expertise or access to information which would lead me to either conclusion, of course.
Finally, please note that your apparent assertion that if birds were found contemporaneously with dinosaurs, then birds necessarily must not have descended from dinosaurs, is a non-sequitur at least because you did not make clear which types of bird have been found contemporaneously with which types of dinosaur. That assertion is trivially refuted because birds might well have emerged as a distinct descendant class of theropod well before the other lines of theropod dinosaurs went extinct; given such a scenario, finding specimens of birds alongside some late species of maniraptor would hardly be surprising or ruinous to the "birds-from-dinos" theory. I hope you understand the context of my refutation, which are intended to be respectful and are not meant as a personal attack or to denigrate you. However, I try to be very careful with my language so that conscientious readers won't come to incorrect conclusions; I suppose I failed to achieve that goal in my previous post, since I am here clarifying it after the fact :).
And just because you don't like the idea of God, He won't go away.
During the inquisition, hundreds of thousands were tortured to death in God's name. Where was God with the smiting? The Auto-da-fey, a carnival of torture put on in God's name for the amusement of visitors, was destroyed by an angry pillar of fire exactly 0 times. It seems to me that He went away a long time ago.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> > Would you mind sharing the idea with us, explain how to measure it in biological systems, tell us how "getting more organized" relates to that measure, state and justify "the law of entropy", and show how "getting more organized" by the information-theoretic measure "flies in the face" of it?
> How about a paraphrase of Goedel's Theorem: Truth is a superset of proof.
Also, E=mc^2, SCOXe has been trading below 4.00, and OBL is in hiding. But you were going to support your claim that the law of entropy can be applied to information theoretic entropy to show that things can't get more organized without a certain Person's help.
We can talk about all that other stuff in more appropriate contexts.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Yes, God's tolerance of Evil is a complete mystery, but according to the Bible He is planning on straightening the entire mess out on Jugment Day.
I advise you to be on His side before then.
I'm sorry, but as evidenced by his actions, if he is around he's not the kind of guy who's company I want to keep. I never did have much patience for extortionists.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Here's the point I am making: You cannot derive God logically, mathematically, physically, or otherwise. He lives outside our system of existence. It is possible for Him to get to us through it, but not for us to get to Him, unless He comes to "take us." And I am not talking about aliens.
Seems nobody wants to give God credit for anything. I give Him credit and thank Him for making me and giving me life.
And, to make you happy, (or not) I do have:
1. A Bachelor of Computer Engineering (B.Comp.E.),
2. A B.S. Comp Sci, and
3. A M.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and I have been in the industry for almost 15 years.
So I know a little about the subject of which were speaking. I'm just not interested in purely theoretical mathematics.
I never did have much patience for extortionists.
He's a giver, not a taker. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or ignorant. Watch the Passion of the Christ, knowing that it is historically accurate, and ask yourself
"Why would anyone willingly go through such a thing?" All He had to do was take back what He said and they would have let Him go.
> Here's the point I am making: You cannot derive God logically, mathematically, physically, or otherwise. He lives outside our system of existence. It is possible for Him to get to us through it, but not for us to get to Him, unless He comes to "take us." And I am not talking about aliens.
Is that a retraction of your claim that "the law of entropy" tells us that "a Person" must be involved?
> Seems nobody wants to give God credit for anything. I give Him credit and thank Him for making me and giving me life.
Why not Cthulhu?
> And, to make you happy, (or not) I do have:
1. A Bachelor of Computer Engineering (B.Comp.E.),
2. A B.S. Comp Sci, and
3. A M.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and I have been in the industry for almost 15 years.
That's not a substitute for an answer.
> So I know a little about the subject of which were speaking. I'm just not interested in purely theoretical mathematics.
I too have Amazing Credentials (tm), and am eager to see your mathematical treatment of Shannon information and the law of entropy. I might even be able to spot the flaws in your treatment -- in the unlikely event that any exist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I can't find a good example (other than the obvious one plants do every day) but any endothermic synthesis reaction should fit the bill, neh?
Unfortunately endothermic synthesis doesn't fit the bill. endothermic synthesis is just a chemical reaction, as is photosynthesis. It doesn't create information. In fact, bombard cells with radiation and you eventually destroy the DNA the cell carries.
Why? Is she a chicken?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just MMing. This is bloody funny!
Wikileaks, no DNS
Ah, well good thing that wasn't my argument. I was merely saying that energy can organize matter together.
Now on what were you are saying, it depends what you define as information.
Amazing how a single photo can be so... misleading...