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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."
Just a thought, but how can you tell from a fossil that this animal had a "brightly coloured" and "feathered" nasal crest?!
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
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
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)
And a grey beard at that.
Dude, that's the whole point of science, revising explanations based on evidence to try to figure out what's going on. Nowhere does it say these scientists think they're 100% right. That tone comes from the news reporter's simplification of things for a general audience.
THE NERD IS THE COMPUTER.
>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
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I wouldn't say there's all that much competition to find "older and older" fossils. The reason the specimen is so interesting is the features it displays and the fact that it was found in northern China, rather than the western US.
Even if there is extreme competition for finding the "oldest" example of something, you've badly misunderstood the way things are dated. What actually matters is that it was in the Oxfordian Stage of the Late Jurassic. In geology, we're really interested in relative ages, not absolute ages. In this case, radiometric dating might have been used to constrain the age of the rock units, but the fossil itself isn't what's dated, it's nearby ash beds or intrusions. The relative age of the rocks is based on regional and global correlations of rock units using a number of different methods.
Radiometric dates are solid, nonetheless. There are a number of factors that affect them, and these are accounted for when one uses any of the numerous methods of radiocarbon dating. All measurements have a margin of error, as well, and for most it's a lot more than a few thousand years! If you were to date a mineral grain formed yesterday with any method capable of dating something in the Jurassic, you could expect to get an age of perhaps even a few million years old, and it be still be correct, as it's comfortably within the margin of error. At any rate, the age of something isn't based on a single sample, or when possible, even based on a single method of measurement.
As regards your much larger question of throwing out data that doesn't fit, yes, this is done, both directly and indirectly, and for both real and imagined reasons. If something's obviously been contaminated, it's thrown out. If something doesn't fit with the bulk of the data, it's often disregarded, sometimes in error. There are plenty of examples of "bad science" where conclusions are drawn on laughably shaky data. A conclusion that fits the dominant paradigm will indeed have a much easier time making it through peer review than a challenging idea. The reason for this is simple; the fundamental assumptions of any field have an incredible amount of evidence to back them up. Something than contradicts this needs to be able to explain previous evidence, and have enough supporting data to outweigh whatever paradigm it is opposing.
In general, however, the scientific community is nowhere near as sloppy or close-minded as the general public seems to think they are. You have to assume something to be able to conclude anything. All science is an inverse problem, and as such, there are always an infinite number of "right" answers. To filter through these, we apply whatever paradigms have been established. This doesn't mean that we just conclude whatever we want; it just means that we evaluate things based on what's been observed before. It's impossible to do otherwise.
At any rate, I applaud your critical thinking, but please do consider that people who have devoted their lives to something do stop to consider the obvious.
"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
I'm guessing you don't know what is typically looked at when bones are studied. I won't claim that I do, but I would argue that what is inferred is anything but an "educated guess". It's not guesswork. And to claim that it is, is to undermine over a century of real study done by individuals who, amonst other things, have dedicated their entire lives to the subject.
Evidence is evidence. Archeologists follow the same science as forensics. Forensic scientists study bones and inffer real events that are admissible in court. In this case the science can make or break an individual, and yet it is *valid*.
...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
Dinosaur skeletons can be classified as bird-hipped or lizard hipped. We also have exmaples of bird-hipped and bird footed. Why then do the 'experts' claim without a hint of sarcasm that birds evolved from the lizard-hipped variety (like t-rex)?
Also, if these remains show a feathered crest, and are so much OLDER than the dinosaurs which LATER evolved into birds, then does that mean I can be born before my grandparents?
Has anyone else heard of circular reasoning? It goes like this: "The fossils are very old because they were found in very old rocks. We know the rocks are very old because they had fossils in them!"
It's about time science made the theory fit the evidence, instead of trying to force the evidence in the theory. Science was SUPPOSED to be about finding a theory which could explain the observable facts. Too often now it's about making sure that only observations which are interpreted according to the most popular theory are allowed to be published. Questioning a theory is apparently forbidden by those who point the finger at religion for being fanatical.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
"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."
Uhhhh.... bull. Discarding fossils because there is no way they can be so old? DARWIN? Kiddo, there wasn't even a well developed idea about the age of the earth when Darwin was around, much less a sense of the complete collumn. Methinks you got this story a bit mixed up.