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?!

Re:Brightly coloured?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

The presence of a nasal crest is particularly interesting, says Norell, because it is so similar to the head ornaments carried by many of today's birds. Both birds and carnivorous dinosaurs such as tyrannosaurs belong to the evolutionary family known as the theropods.

The crest of G. wucaii probably functioned as a signal, either to attract potential mates or for species recognition.

So I presume that the idea that the crest had color comes from its links with todays birds.

Re:Brightly coloured?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they know about the structure of the crest from the fossil imprint. They don't know if it was multi-coloured, or what colour it was at all; however, because it shares similar features to that of the nasal crests of modern birds, which use brightly coloured crests as mating displays, they guess that this may have had a similar function.

Re:Brightly coloured?

[archgoon]

From the article: The presence of a nasal crest is particularly interesting, says Norell, because it is so similar to the head ornaments carried by many of today's birds. So, by the sound of it, we've seen other animals that have this bone structure, and they have feathers there (and sounds like it doesn't do anything except have feathers there). As for brightly colored, I don't know where that came from. It's not mentioned in the article, perhaps the submitter read about this somewhere else.

Ha ha ha America

[MillionthMonkey]

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!

Re:Ha ha ha America

[Afecks]

America have
bill of rights
democratic elections
ethnic diversity
root name servers
Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple....

Dinosaur? Great Wall?

[ben_1432]

This sounds very familiar. Was there a giant gorilla too?

...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.

Head crest?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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!

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. :-)

What Real Scientists Think

[ChaoticCoyote]

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.

Not in TFA

[KwKSilver]

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.

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?

Re:Compete to find the oldest

[Copid]

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)?

You might find this useful.

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?

Perhaps it just means that feathered dinosaurs existed earlier than was originally thought? You seem to think that all dinosaurs must have been feathered or all dinosaurs must have been unfethered--always. There's no reason to beleive that other than the simplistic assumption that there is some sort of linear progression from unfeathered to feathered to birds.

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!"

Of course, no geologist has ever thought about that. You've destroyed the entire theory of evolution by pointing out that the geologists have polluted their science simply to cover for the biologists. Have you really thought about this? Not all strata are dated with index fossils. There are other methods and, not surprisingly, their results AGREE with each other. Also, deciding whether something is older than something else can be done using the relatively simple assumption that stuff at the bottom is older than stuff at the top. The relative ages of the strata were worked out well before the theory of evolution even came to be. There is no conspiracy.

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.

So what's your interpretation of it all? It looks to me like there was a time when dinosaurs existed but there were no birds. Now we have birds but no dinosaurs. Where did the birds come from? Are we just wrong, and did the birds and dinosaurs coexist? Please point to some evidence either way, or you're just another armchair scientist who hasn't looked at a fraction of a percent of what's actually out there.

Questioning a theory is apparently forbidden by those who point the finger at religion for being fanatical.

It's an interesting coincidence that most of the people who question evolution and the age of the earth have a religious bone to pick. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's also clear that most people who post nonsense like the "circular reasoning" argument for geological dating also don't know their asses from holes in the ground. It's pretty easy to put 2 and 2 together and realize that most of their positions are not based on the evidence.

Re:I'm happy to undermine TWO centuries...

[plunge]

You are acting like there is some sort of binary: either they know for certain, or its just a guess. This is nonsense. Some things are known to a very high degree of certainty, because multiple lines of evidence all converge. Sometimes things are less well supported... and people generally say so.