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Evidence Dinosaurs Are Like Giant Chicks
ZeroExistenZ writes "timesonline reports the new "irrefutable" fossil evidence of dino's resembling "giant chicks" more then reptiles as formerly accepted. Gareth Dyke: "The way these creatures are depicted can no longer be considered scientifically accurate," he said. "All the evidence is that they looked more like birds than reptiles. Tyrannosaurs might have resembled giant chicks.""
I, for one, welcome our new Giant Chick overlords.
So it looks like I wouldn't have been able to score with a dinosaur, either...
That's why snakes taste like chicken.
What's up with Slashdot's science news these days? You guys are reporting the obvious as if it was late breaking news (ozone, parasites that control hosts, now this).
The way these creatures are depicted can no longer be considered scientifically accurate
Dinosaurs have been depicted as bird-like for at least the last 20 years. Even since the 90s, Jurassic Park (the original anyway) tapped noted palentologists to give the dinosaurs what was then a contemporary view of them - fast, warm blooded, very bird like. Many contemporary depictions of dinosaurs have them behaving in a birdlike manner or looking like birds (to the point of having rudimentary or even full fledged feathers).
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Birds are well known to be descendants of dinosaurs. Interestingly, crocodiles were around with the dinosaurs too.
Why UNIX?
And here's an artist rendering of how they might have looked.
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"Upon discovering the new fossilised remains of this giant 50 foot high chick, we've decided to name it the Darylhannansaur"
Task Mangler
Infallible?
Ah, you must be thinking of religion.
Scientific ideas change all the time.
I'm sure people get the two confused all the time.
So they're like chocobos then? Chocobos with sharp, pointy teeth.
There's an old saying: "Ontogeny recapitulated Phylogeny" (or, "baby/fetal X usually looks like X's evolutionary ancestor" - since it's easier for a mutation to successfully edit the adult form than the infant form without causing something else to break).
So if dinosaurs and birds are related, one would expect there to be a lot of similarities to baby birds to down is not surprising. However, I'm not convinced about the immediate leap to a theory of multi-coloured down when chicks are usually mono-unicolour.
<CavemanBob> AAAAUgHHhhHHh! Why can't you just SHUT UP?
<HugeChickRex> It was like, so hilarious! I hadn't realized I left that pizza there in there for a MONTH! *snort*
<CavemanBob> AAaaghghu I make you extinct now!
Oh the poor T.Rex...gone from being the most powerful and vicious creature imaginable - chasing down jeeps and eating lawyers and shaking the ground as it runs...then we hear that if it ran at more than 8 mph, it would fall over...then that if it ever did fall over, it couldn't get back up again...then they told us that it was merely a scavenger and not a hunter at all.
AND NOW IT LOOKS LIKE A GIANT, FLUFFY YELLOW CHICK?!?
Nooooo!
T.Rex's had laser eyes, breathed fire and had enormous leathery batlike wings that don't show up in the fossil record because they were shed every year to grow new ones. They could run at 80mph and ate several Diploducus for breakfast every morning before having violent terratorial disputes that took up the rest of their days. At night they tracked down and ate cavemen. Their advanced (but brutal and inhumane) society dominated the earth for 20 million years and was only brought down by alien civilisations hurling giant flaming meteors at them from the safe distance of the Kyper belt.
OK - maybe I lost a bit of scientific detachment there - but..*REALLY*.
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...on the "Fry Hard 2" episode of Good Eats.
He used one of these, minus skull, tail and the bottom half of the legs, to demonstrate the proper way to dismantle a whole chicken for frying.
~Philly
Now imagine a 50 foot chicken...and you're the bug.
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This one at the BBC discusses the find in more depth and also mentions that the feathers were primarily on smaller dinosaurs, but even our beloved T-Rex may have hatched cute li'l chicks.
And this American Museum of Natural History article discusses a diorama they're putting up based on the find, including pictures of their conceptions of the dinosaurs today.
Really, submitter could have contributed a lot more information with a little basic research.
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reporting the obvious
Oh, well, now, I wouldn't say that.
This article is from February 2003. The guy is an evolutionary biologist, but search for the word 'factory' and notice where this factory is rumored to exist. You guessed it, Liaoning Province.
Very interesting read.
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The way I've understood it, and the way I believe most have understood it for decades was that dinosaurs were originally reptilic but as time went on and the species diverged through evolution, a good chunk became somewhat primitively feathered. Here are 2 depicitions that I pulled off of wikipedia( 1 and 2), but I mean this isn't news, the article is just talking about more recent dinosaurs rather then the oldest (we have fossils of the crocodilia from the late triassic period that nearly match today's crocodiles, implying that at least some were reptilic) and we already know that in the Jurassic period birds and dinoaurs with feather-like features started appearing around the same time that small mammals became abundant. This aritcle isn't news, its stating what is already known, or at the very most, taking what is known and claiming that it possibly applies to a few more dinosaurs.
Regards,
Steve
It's now Jurassic PA-KAAAWWK!
You must think in Russian.
This doesn't quite make sense.
Once feathers evolved, it would be only a short time before their lifting qualities would enable the evolution of high-jumping then gliding then flying dinosaurs.
There should be a huge number of fossils of a huge number of species of dinosaur-era birdlike creatures. But we only see a few.
So these "feathers" couldn't have been very much like what we think of as feathers.
Or else something about being avian kept those creatures from becoming fossils. Which implies that there may be other entire swaths of the genetic diversity that were prevented from becoming fossils. Which mean the dinosaurs we're finding are only the animals that couldn't avoid the tar-pits and eruptions and mudslides. That is, the period may have been many times more diverse and interesting than we're being allowed to see.