The World's Deepest Dinosaur

FiReaNGeL writes to tell us BiologyNews.net is reporting that Norway has uncovered their first set of dinosaur remains. The catch? They found it 2,256 meters below the ocean floor. From the article: "It is merely a coincidence that the remains of the old dinosaur now see the light of day again, or more precisely, parts of the dinosaur. The fossil is in fact just a crushed knucklebone in a drilling core - a long cylinder of rock drilled out from an exploration well at the Snorre offshore field."

Comments

Wow

[Capt'n Hector]

I wonder what things will be like 200 million years from today, what adanced (or not so advanced) civilization will uncover the golden gate bridge, or statue of liberty. Entire continents submerged under thousands of feet of water and mud? This impetuous yet infinitesimal progression of gradualism really makes catastrophic events like Katrina seem like child's play. There's no greater force than time.

Re:Wow

[RancidPeanutOil]

200 million years is a long time. I'm guessing the statue of liberty, barring some perfect preservation disaster, will be an oblong mass of blue-ish powder, and the golden gate bridge will be a square-ish patch of whatever color its metal will corrode to. Most likely a zigzag shape, what with the earthquakes etc. over that period of time. Our (human) pyramids are only 6000 years old, and their outer surface is gone - another 100k years, they'll just be piles of rubble. Even with millions of years, fossilization is a rare occurance, and the materials of earth are destined to be reabsorbed - aliens of the future will find plastic powders where our landfills were, with little clue as to real shape or function. Makes ya wonder how many skyscrapers and pyramids the dinosaurs made 650 million years ago that have eroded away.

Re:How did it get there?

[breadboy21]

"The question of how dinosaur fossils could be submerged to that depth is pretty interesting."

A worldwide flood perhaps?

What will remain of us in 200 million years?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The lunar landing sites will still be recognizable in 200 million years. Even the footprints are estimated to survive for a hundred times the age of the Pyramids.

Voyager 2 and Pioneer 10 will outlive the Earth.

Sign of Age

[Metabolife]

Usually the lower beneath the surface a fossil is, the old it, due to the fact that soil is deposited over time. I wonder what the results of a carbon dating would show.

Re:Proof!

[Xeriar]

The flood is pretty widely accepted. Every culture dating back to then (and conveniently located in the middle east/N Africa/Mediteranian) has its own flood myths, and the geologic record supports it. There probably was a huge flood that flooded the whole region at one point, but there probably wasn't a drunk with a boat and 2 of every animal.

The flooding of the Marmara sea and the Babylonian flood circa ~2,200 B.C.E. are fairly well-known, along with a number of other floods in the region. Some of these flood myths, such as the Turkish one, actually recalls the specific flood itself.

There is some evidence, though disputed, of extensive flooding about ten thousand years ago, during the end of the last ice age, that wiped out an extant bronze-age civilization. I don't put a whole lot of stock in it, though it is a nice fancy.