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Two-headed Reptile Fossil Found in China
[TheBORG] writes "A tiny skeleton from the Early Cretaceous shows an embryonic or newborn reptile with two heads and two necks, called axial bifurcation ('two-headedness') (a well-known developmental flaw among reptile species today such as turtles and snakes) was found in China by French and Chinese paleontologists recovered from the Yixian Formation, which is nearly 150 million years old."
Seriously, I wonder if there is any evolutionary connection between the placement of some neural processing in the hindquarters and the frequency of two heads in the reptilian class, as if mother nature was experimenting with protecting brainpower by moving it around to a safer location, or by duplicating it. Since reptiles had the first big brains, this may have been the first occasion to arise in which trying to protect brains might be worth the expense.
French and Chinese scientists? Two heads?
Time for clozapine.
Ninjas and pirates. How piquant.
But everyone looked at me like I had two heads.
Not to be all stereotypical but a lot of outrageous claims and fakes have come from that area in the last couple years. I hope some super-experts examine it. After that, I bet this won't be the last time we hear about it on Slashdot. Oh and heheheheheh at the picture in the article :P
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I wonder if it also has a saddle node bifurcation. You know, because it likes to live under the blue sky.
Especially after seeing the photo of a sketch of some cartoon character at the story.
The 2 headed reptile does not even hold a candle to this 7 legged deer!!! http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,236483,00.html
More pictures:
http://www.mdwfp.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=245 89
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
We've seen two-headed animals from China before. Apparently the pollution there is getting so bad it's going back in time!
I don't know what Latin name they're going to give this two-headed creature, but it seems like they should try to squeeze "zaphod" in there somewhere.
So someone found the American Communist Party buried in China?! Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis are bound to show up next!
So that's where Karl Rove went!
The beebs article has slightly more details and a picture of the actual fossil and a two headed snake.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6195345.stm
I'm not a biologist so does anyone know if the second head is fully functional? I'd have thought there'd be serious blood flow issues and it'd be unlikely for these animals to live very long but the snake at the bottom of the article doesn't look young. Does it act as a redundant system used only if the primary one fails or do they actually process stimuli from both heads? What happens if the stimuli are conflicting? Can someone point me towards anything on decesion making in these creatures or are they just not enough to study this. The beeb article says something vague about the condition being due to damage to the embryo possibly. What sort of damage? and how accepted is this?
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I, for one, welcome our ancient dual-core overlords.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
I saw a 2-header girl on the T.V. They have two heart/lung systems and two arms/legs, and TWO HEADS. Have you seen the Ray Milan / Rosie Greer movie, of a white racist's head implanted on a black guy's body (with two heads now)? They were just like that. A marvel of genetic engineering? Two heads are better than one? I firmly believe that is not true.
Were the heads named "Gates" and "Ballmer"? Just asking... it seems appropriate.
C|N>K
Why is it when something is out of the ordinary, its a flaw? axial bifurcation ('two-headedness') (a well-known developmental flaw among reptile species today such as turtles and snakes).. Every species on earth has a flaw that helps it survive in its environment. As far as I can see, Two Heads are the same as having two hands. Its not a flaw, its a step in evolution. When we see something like 6 fingers in a human, we think its a flaw. Why do we think that these defects are flaw not as step to human evolution? I see no flaw but evolution.
Two-headed reptile. 160 million years old.
Yup, that's her.
Look buddy, if it didn't have three heads and a Heart of Gold, it's not newsworthy!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Axial bifurcation is nothing special. But axial trifurcation, on a dog, well that's called a Hades special... and yeah, Orthrus is totally jealous.
P.S. Also, don't mention his little brother Chimi. That dog will bite you...
next to the fossil, the researchers just found the burned remains of a small humanoid creature, and a golden ring....
The scientists continue to fight over who gets to keep The precioussssss (Ring).
Add water cooling!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Today scientists discovered remains of humans, believed to live 10 billion years ago, with two heads...
Seriously - unless the fact that siamese twins existed today was well documented, how else would scientists know hundreds of years from now how Humans looked like, and more importantly, how would they know that twin headed babies had actually nothing to do with evolution?
I expect all animal species to have similar flukes - I have personally seen it in chickens and cows. The problem is that in ancient times, these occurrences were not always well documented.
This does not IMHO proof anything except that there was a creature like this at some stage of our history.
Need an ISP in South Africa?
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I've seen a picture of the fossil (alongside the painted picture) and, assuming the fossill itself hasn't been faked, the cartoon is quite true to the fossil.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Not to be outdone, Japanese scientists have discovered a three-headed monster with two legs, bat-like wings, and two tails.
Tokyo residents are fearfully awaiting the appearance of a giant moth and two tiny priestesses...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
they found in egypt
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29976
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
welcome our two-headed overlords!
...to feed these two headed creatures, that is.
In Soviet Russia the coat of arms founds YOU!
Science Headline 2008: Evidence Indicates Saurian Extinction Caused By Recessive Bicephallic Gene
Can you imagine what downtown New York at rush hour would be like if a large fraction of the population had two heads!!!
You DO see polycephaly in things more advanced than reptiles, although it's less frequent.
(And a greater part of the organism is redundant in mammals that survive, as in the above Siamese twins).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Darwin's natural selection is amazing. It just had finished with two-head-animals before the XX century. Maybe some politician would have the smart idea of taxing two-head-ppl in double.
Of the fossil at this BBC article.
An ancient sign that says "Come See Cronks 2 Headed Pet, Only 3 Eggs and a Shiny Rock To Get In"
Two headed fossil found!!!
Amazingly, right next to this was another amazing find, a similar species with two tails!
There have been retarded turtles roaming the earth for 150 million years now. God speed, retarded little turtles....God speed.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
We're getting closer to answering the age old question, Have two heads, always, been better than one ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Given that Intelligent Design is the one-true-truth to the 'Pubs and the fact that they're busy talking out of both sides of their mouths about their original goals and plans for the Iraq war I propose we replace their mascot with this lizard.
Two heads, who cares ... what I want to know is, "Did they have slanted eyes?"
Funny how easy it is to find fossils with a "developmental flaw", and difficult to find "transitional" fossils. Why does "science" assume this was a flaw? Why isn't the first assumption that there were two headed reptiles running around millions of years ago?
Any word on whether or not they've found a reptile with a big beefy arm coming out the back of it's neck?
It's hard to imagine that a frail newborn reptile's skeleton/body could survive the large amount of time needed to be fossilized without decaying.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZzvKNGoIVwc
You think a two-headed reptile is interesting.... Check this out.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Are these related to Republicans - after all, those reptiles have already got two faces.
So God's been fucking up his engineering for a lot longer than 6,000 years?!?!?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Evolution is very powerful, but it is not a perfect optimization process. And in any case how the heck do you define "perfect?"
The genetic algorithm is a "hill climbing" or "greedy algorithm." It can get caught in local maxima. (Sex acts to break us out of local maxima -- our children are likely to be some distance from us in genetic space because their genes are a mix of our genes and our mate's genes. But there's only so much that it can accomplish.)
There could be enormous advantages to putting our brain in our torso in terms of protection. But the distance in genetic space might be too large and the intervening configurations too awkward for our species' genes to get us there.
Earliest known fossil of a 2-faced politician found.
Unfortunately, no-one believed it then either, so it died out.
Mother Nature constantly tries small changes in the blueprints of life, and some of these results in life that is more fit to the environment.
This is microoptimization, and if you keep it up long enough you will reach a local optimum (or would, if the environment didn't constantly change). But there is no guarantee this will also be a global optimum.
Thus, the "if it could have been improved, it would already have been done" mantra is as wrong in Nature, as it is wrong (and damaging) in man made systems.
No surprises there. It's well-known that the nuclear plants belonging to the dinosaurs were unregulated and dangerous. A two-headed lizard is an obvious sign of waste leaking out into the natural environment.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Yeah and on the other hand, the Siamese twins appear to be very alive, whereas the double headed dinosaur (split only above the neck) is the fossil of a dead *embryo* (or newly hatched) not the fossil of something that happen to have lived a healthy life and died of old age.
(And I could also add that on the outer, the Siamese twins look like an actual single body with two heads. Also we have only fossil records of the bones of the two headed dinosaur, not its internal organs some of which may have been redundant)
Yeah but that doesn't have anything to do with the level of evolution advances of the subject, as your initial post implied.
Polycephaly depends on a lot of factors.
Warm blooded animals like humans need much more oxygen than cold blooded animals to keep alive. The brain has a specially high oxygen requirement.
That translates that the 4-chambers hearth of mammals may not provide enough blood flow to irrigate successfully an additional head. (In fact, in cases where Siamese twins share a single heath, sometimes only one of the two is fully developed by "stealing" blood flow from the other) Therefore redundant hearths as in the mentioned Siamese are almost mandatory.
On the other hand, although they have lower oxygen requirement, reptiles still have a 3-chambers hearth that can closely control the mix of oxygenated blood and in some species change into a 4-chambers mode. Therefore, they're much more likely to have enough blood supply for two heads (almost the same pump but lower requirement).
But more primitive animals like amphibians and fishes are *less* likely to feature polycephaly, even if they are less advanced then reptiles, mostly because they have less powerful hearths (regular 3-chamber and 2-chamber respectively). Also those animals have larval stages and two-headed tadpoles are surely an easier prey for predators and less likely to survive until adult forms.
Also, except for humans, two-headed animals have to be able to survive, eat, flee from predators, etc... locomotion is partially handled by spinal reflexes. Having a single spine helps locomotion coordination. Which is easier in animal orders that tolerates better two heads from the neck up. In mammals like humans, you need redundant hearths, and therefore more often there's redundancy in chest which may translate in double spines which make locomotion coordination harder. The mentioned Siamese twins had to learn to coordinate a bit to be able to walk. And each of the twins controls exclusively its own arm - running away from a predator when you have to think how to coordinate locomotion is harder than needing just one of the head to think "run away" and the body correctly running under the control of a single spine.
When comparing to mammals, it also helps that reptiles rely a little bit more on instincts than on complex thinking process (that would be harder to coordinate between two heads. Imagine if both had to come to an agreement before doing anything)
Finally some reptilians come with an external shell which is handy because :
- it provides additional protection even if the polycephaleous monster is an easier prey
- helps to keep the whole structure together and erect even if the split point is lower
- maintains the heads and the half bodies apart and prevents one of instinctively attacking the other because of competition for food (an event which is less likely in more intelligent animals like humans...)
I think that those rational arguments look much more valid than the "polycephaly happens only up to a given point in evolution".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Two heads are not better than one, else this creature would still be around.
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