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Oldest T. Rex Relative Unveiled
Dr Occult writes "A group of researchers have found the forefather of T. Rex in Xinjiang province in northwestern China. It lived around 160 million years ago. This makes it more than twice as old as T. Rex, and the most primitive known member of the family. The researchers were surprised to learn the 3m long dinosaur sported a spectacular feathered crest on its head which may have been brightly coloured."
pffff, no factor. if chinese were around 160 millions years ago, forefather of t-Rex would be dinner. bring it on.
Just a thought, but how can you tell from a fossil that this animal had a "brightly coloured" and "feathered" nasal crest?!
...was a giant black stone monolith that let out a loud buzzing noise when researchers uncovered it, possibly explaining how it evolved to T.Rex as we know it.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Ha ha ha America
China have
T Rex father
160 million year old dinosaur
in Xinjiang province
American hillbilly have
intelligent design
So commence cry
as you not keep up
What no dinosaur?
Too bad so sad
Already you behind
We sell you dinosaur
make you good deal hillbilly!
This sounds very familiar. Was there a giant gorilla too?
Yes, I am serious!
The Nature news report is based on another Nature article by Xu (subscription required) which does not mention feathers because there are none!
John Roach did this with a National Geographic article on the discovery of dilong paradoxus, also reported in Nature. Five fossils were found, the most decripit of which had "a partial coat of hairlike feathers", which in other articles are described as "evidence of hairlike structures" on its head and as "'protofeathers'". Need I point out that there is a world of difference between hairs and feathers?
D paradoxus' "hairlike structures" got turned into a rich, thick coat of fully-developed feathers by the concept artist. Excellent way to do science, no? Guanlong wucaii has no feathers.
Want to hear the logic for feathering it? I quote from the NatGeo article: "Holtz noted that, if the early feathers of Sinosauropteryx and the feathers of birds and other feathered dinosaurs are all expressions of the same evolutionary change, 'then we have to infer that tyrannosaurids also had some expression of the same trait [feathers]. [...] To infer otherwise would be invoking an evolutionary change for which we had no evidence,' he said."
Ta-dish boom! There you have it, folks: it has feathers because we think that they all did.
Obviously, several people really, really want there to be feathered dinosaurs, even if they have to glue each pinion on personally.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The researchers were surprised to learn the 3m long...
3 metres is rather small isn't it? How big was T. rex ?
"The researchers were surprised to learn the 3m long dinosaur sported a spectacular feathered crest on its head which may have been brightly coloured."
Hell I was surprised too! Being that old I would have guessed a beard!
t.rex come from engerland?
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
bang a gong...
sheesh, whatever happened to covering new news on the slash? I saw a newspaper article on this pinned to the board at school yesterday, so it was probably published Thursday. There's less and less reason to peruse this tired old hack of a site all the time. Oh, but that's old news, too.
Ok, yea, dinosaurs existed. 160 million years seems to be something we cannot estimate. How you know it was the forefather of T-rex? Do you know 100%? no. Just like the bible... do you know 100%.. no. i love how scientists think they are right. Wasn't there a story on slashdot a while ago about how science is over 50% wrong... meaning we keep changing what we said after a few years? blah blah blah.
Science is a process of debate and analysis, and there have been a couple of interesting threads among paleontologists regarding interpretation of the Guanlong fossil:
Thread 1
Thread 2
Much as I like the artist's depiction of Guanlong, he did take some creative liberties that obscure the underlying science. Ignoring the art and focusing on the article itself, the major item of interest in the crest. Many Jurassic carnosaurs had crests; why this feature evolved, and why it "went away" later is being debated.
All about me
When white people rob graves it's called Science!
There is so much competition to find the oldest fossils... it really makes me question the dating on this.
Sometimes, things have been re-dated and re-dated each time coming up with dramatically older dates.
As a matter of fact, I've heard of incidents where people took samples from living animals, for example, a mollusk, and the dating shows them as being many thousands of years old.
In a book written by Charles Darwin, he meets with an archaeologist digging on Galapagos Island. He watches in amazement as they routinely discard interesting looking samples because there's no way they can be old enough to be found at the depth. This is done routinely even today... if a scientific measurement is not inline with expectations, it's discarded and assumed to be inaccurate.
How can we possibly find the truth when researches are both highly motivated to find older and older fossils, and therefore closed minded to ideas that might jeopardize what the currently believe?
Just went back & reread TFA. It says nothing about feathers for this beastie. The "colored" part comes from the fact that the rock stratum/strata it was found in was brightly colored. In short, the submitter seems to have mis-summarized or misread TFA or intended to post another one, perhaps about Bette Middler or Cher.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Mod parent up +1, Classic Sci-Fi Refrence
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
The posted thread do have interesting content, including speculations about feathers & other topics.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
The only way to tell if a creature had feathers or not is if you find it in a Lagerstatte, or an area with fossils preserving soft parts. Lagerstatten are relatively rare, the most famous being the Burgess Shale; our half dozen Archaeopteryx specimens are all Lagerstatten fossils, though, so they're not all confined to the Cambrian explosion. (In fact, there exists a pre-Cambrian Lagerstatte, if memory serves.)
Anyway, considering the rarity of Lagerstatten, there would be more excitement over this find if it had soft tissues preserved, even if there were no new species found at the site.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/museum/ (though it pains me to link to it)
The article states that the feathered nasal crest was used for attraction or species recognition. I was thinking that there might have been a sensory funtion as well, since skull bones (and empty spaces) are often arranged in nature to transmit or amplify vibrations in the animal's environment. Being that the crest was, again according to the article, made of very thin material, I would think it would be useful in picking up very small air movements and transmitting them to the creature's nervous system. Might be useful in hunting small prey or in directing the terminal phase of a lunge or something like that. Then again, perhaps it was just another of Nature's evolutionary experiments that failed to pan out.
And a grey beard at that.
Get it On!
Bang a Gong!
Noah could not fit the t-rex or brontasaurus on the ark, so they died off.
I love how science keeps making up new rules to base their bad beliefs on. Why 100 million years? Why not 1000 million years, 2000 million?
>The researchers were surprised to learn the 3m long dinosaur sported a spectacular feathered crest on its head which may have been brightly coloured."
Other historians believe it was a mop of black hair
What did it taste like?
Before you write that concept off as too bizarre to deal with, consider the many species which have been written off as extinct (for 65 million years, in the case of ceolacanth) only to turn up later (in an Indonesian fish market, for this one) in real life.
While there is still scope for an herbivorous dinosaur to be kicking about on our fine planet, a colony of something more than twice as long as a very large crocodile, ten times as massive and striding about on two feet would be kind of hard to miss. We may yet still stumble across aquatic dinosaurs (think chronosaurus) as there is much more opportunity for concealment underwater, however I rate this as unlikely.
What this means is that we only have the bones to go on. We're basically guessing when we decide how they stood and moved. Intelligent guesses, yes, but no way to prove anything. A very few dinosaurs have been preserved with some stomach contents, so we have some broad hints about what they eat (although it's more than possible to come unstuck here, too; several contemporary animals were thought of as predators based on bones but in real life were fructivores; a small animal inadvertantly ingested alongside a herbivore's large meal of fruit may have been preserved where the fruit was not; conditions leading up to interment may stress the "sample" and cause it to behave atypically; and so on).
In short, what we "know" is a guess piled on an hypothesis perched on a huge mound of surmise. If it all happens to come together at the end, that's excellent, but we really have no way to know whether we arrived at a good-looking set of answers through correct reasoning, or have simply convinced ourselves through protracted wishful thinking that a wrong answer is "correct enough", as Mr All Therapods Had Feathers in the original article evidently did.
Every so often someone questions the emperors' new clothes in public, and if providence smiles upon us a certain amount of real scientific progress is made before the defenders of the status quo find their feet again and rush to re-establish scientific homeostasis.
I leave you with a quote from a bloke who goes by the name of Planck... you may have heard of him? If not, start looking up the names of German scientific establishments:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
"The $FEATURE of $SPECIES probably functioned as a signal, either to attract potential mates or for species recognition." translates in lay terms as "We have absolutely no idea what $FEATURE really was or how $SPECIES used it, but don't want to seem ignorant".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...a rapidly dwindling pool of friends to help bail them out of the diplomatic cacky every time they arrogantly stomp all over some "lesser" country's rights, something Dubya is sadly reknowned for but hardly the pioneer of.
China has Intelligent Design too, and Creationists, but they are unofficially forbidden by the government there. In America, freedom of thought is more of a detente, with the Christian Right and Liberal Atheists having fought each other more or less to a standstill across the board, leaving what amounts to a tense two-way balance of power rather than genuine freedom of thought.
I'm tempted to start in on the sorry state of freedom in Germany, France, Australia (my own country) and a few others to demonstrate that I'm not actually picking on the USA, but it would take too long. Please deem that all included.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...in favour of a 17m, 9-tonne Spinosaurus.
My paleontological qualifications are about the same as yours, but include 8- and 10-year-old nephews as well.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...if it seems necessary.
The people studying bones look at a myriad factors. They study density and structure in the bones themselves, wear patterns and tooth-marks (or whatever), state of articulation, any adjacent indications of soft tissue or the like, chemical residues in the bones (including, in several cases, complete blood cells and still-flexible cartilage: a flares-fireworks-and-sirens tip-off that we really are barking up the wrong tree in several fields of scientific endeavour, but one which has been largely blipped over), features in bones of similar appearance, location, orientation, lots of stuff. It's not at all slapdash in that regard, but it is all still basically a guess. Often a very educated one, mind you, nevertheless, a guess.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Someone willing to change their mind on the basis of fresh evidence is something of an anomaly here. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
As a matter of fact, I've heard of incidents where people took samples from living animals, for example, a mollusk, and the dating shows them as being many thousands of years old.
Dude, you need to spend more time researching the arguments you try to present.
First, I'll tell you that I myself am a Young Earth Creationist. Keep that in mind when you read the next sentence:
The "living mollusk" attack on carbon-14 dating is one of the most dramatically fallacious displays of ignorance in the entire Creation/Evolution debate.
Remember that part about me being a Young Earth Creationist, and try to open your mind to the possibility that you're using a very bad argument. Now read on.
The problem with it is that it's not anomalous, to a mainstream geologist. A prerequisite for carbon dating is that the object in question must derive its carbon from the atmosphere. If a C14 technician knows, as with mollusks, that the carbon in the object (the mollusk shell) is absorbed from mineral deposits, he will predict that the C14 age will be rather old. He will know that he isn't measuring the age of the mollusk, but something like the age of the mineral deposits in the mollusk's environment. (Think of it this way: It's like saying that radiometric dating must be wrong because it says that Mount Rushmore is older than a century.)
Basically, you're trying to disprove a hypothesis by reporting that one of its predictions have been verified!
Look into this some more for yourself, verify what I'm telling you. When you realize that you were spouting nonsense, take a good look at whether you're being sufficiently critical of the creationist resources you're reading. Double-check anything you read. (If you got that one from Kent Hovind, well, triple-check anything that guy says.) If you don't want to make creationists look like they don't know the first thing about the arguments they're using...well, you need to learn the first thing about the arguments you're using, and make sure they're not built on ignorance.
(Note: On the C14, you can question whether there's a good general criteria for deciding whether to assume that an object got its carbon from the atmosphere. But you still look like an idiot when you present the "living mollusk" thing as though it's anomalous.)
Either you're a clever troll, or you're the first creationist in the history of the world to remain both informed _and_ honest.
Each of those characteristics pops up all the time in young earth creationists but in my experience the combination pretty much always terminates the 'creationist' bit. It did for me. How (and/or why) do you maintain your beliefs when you're obviously aware that the vast preponderance of evidence says you're wrong?
I'm with Gene Wilder in the "awake, but very, very puzzled" state of mind...
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Proving once and for all that the C.P. is a real dinosaur in China
You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating