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."

Comments

Brightly coloured?

[robthebob]

Just a thought, but how can you tell from a fossil that this animal had a "brightly coloured" and "feathered" nasal crest?!

...on a *different* dinosaur.

[leonbrooks]

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.

Re:...on a *different* dinosaur.

[Henry V .009]

Well, the idea that dinosaurs had hair is silly. Hair isn't going to evolve twice. Nor are feathers. But we know that birds descended from certain groups of dinosaurs and that feathers had to get started sometime. It's not unlikely that this is where birds got them from.

Re:Small

[Vengeance]

This is not T. Rex, though. Merely the earliest known ancestor which can be considered 'Tyrannosauridae'.

T. Rex itself, a favorite of schoolchildren everywhere, is notable for being:

1) Found in the USA
2) REALLY big, although it seems there may have been larger meat-eaters after all (see Giganotosaurus).
3) Rather short of reach. This early ancestor had much more 'normal' length arms.
4) Recent. T. Rex was around at the end of the age of the dinosaurs. This guy was around nearly a hundred million years earlier.

I am not a paleontologist, but I have a five year old. :-)

Re:Compete to find the oldest

[Copid]

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.

Reference?

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.

That's to be expected. Anybody who knows how to actually use the dating tools would not do such a thing and expect reasonable results. Anybody telling you otherwise is clueless or trying to manipulate you.

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.

Reference? Are you just making these things up, or did you read it on the illustrious Internet?

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?

Finding truth is easiest when you actually examine the data rather than parrotting unsubstantiated claims made by others. I doubt you'll find much in the way of primary source data that actuall supports what you're saying. Lots of hand wavy "well-known facts" but no real concrete examples. How can we possibly find the truth when so many random folks on the Internet are making authoritative sounding statements about things they clearly know nothing about?