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

There's a problem with this, too

[leonbrooks]

AFAIK, nobody has ever done anything like videotape a therapod in motion, or even snap a still shot of one.

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:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Maxwell Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck