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New Dinosaur Species Is a Missing Link

Posted by samzenpus on from the filling-in-the-blanks dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A new dinosaur provides a link between what paleontologists consider 'early' and 'later' dinosaurs. There's a gap in the fossil record between the oldest known dinosaurs, which walked or ran on their hind legs about 230 million years ago in Argentina and Brazil, and other predatory dinosaurs that lived much later. Daemonosaurus chauliodus helps fill in a blank in dinosaur history."

13 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. And now there are TWO gaps! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    And now there are TWO gaps!

  2. "Daemon"osaurus? by TheABomb · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did it run on Linux?

    Sorry, but it is /., so I had to ask.

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    MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
    1. Re:"Daemon"osaurus? by CheerfulMacFanboy · · Score: 3, Funny

      It ran on the ground, but Linux may well have ran on it.

      If you watch closely, you can see it running in the background in Jurassic Park.

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      Fandroids hate facts.
  3. Species 404? by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

    The missing link?

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    Have gnu, will travel.
  4. Now there are two gaps .. by jc42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In the ongoing "discussion" with the creationists, it has occasionally been pointed out that whenever a biologist finds a fossil that fills in a gap in the fossil record, one result is to replace the one gap with two gaps. Thus, no such discovery can ever persuade the creationists; it just adds to their list of known gaps in the fossil record To them, evolutionary theory can't be ready for prime time until all the fossil gaps are filled in. They don't acknowledge the patterns that biologists find in the (admittedly very sketchy) fossil record.

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    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    1. Re:Now there are two gaps .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Cos they get on our school boards and tell our kids what to think.

    2. Re:Now there are two gaps .. by Creedo · · Score: 3, Informative

      How many kids do you have, and how many school districts are they attending, exactly? Aside from your entire argument, that was a great argument.

      As a parent of two kids in public school in Kansas, yes, I am concerned. I could also point you to several other states, Tennessee being the most recent that I know of, who are attempting to pass laws to let Creationism in through the backdoor. The Creationist movement is quite active, and if we don't stand up to these idiots, they will happily eviscerate public school science education.

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      All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
    3. Re:Now there are two gaps .. by c6gunner · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For example we keep finding primate fossils that are very close relatives to man. Unfortunately, we have never found a fossil that is a direct ancestor of man. All we can say is that man and whatever fossil shared a common ancestor.

      Homo Heidelbergensis
      Homo Antecessor
      Homo Erectus
      Australopithecus Afarensis
      Ardipithecus

      How far back do you want to go?

      It's rather irrelevant, anyway. Let me rephrase your complaint:

      "You've shown me two of your cousins, five of your brothers, three of your sisters, two uncles, and a niece. But you can't show me your mother or father, so clearly you were miracled into existence."

      Yep. Makes perfect sense.

    4. Re:Now there are two gaps .. by cbhacking · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly. The process of evolution is gradual. Speciation doesn't occur in a single generation, or even in a single lifetime.

      Consider equines. Horses and donkeys clearly share an evolutionary ancestor. In fact, they haven't even completely diverged from that ancestor; despite "obviously" being different species, they are inter-fertile. The offspring (mules) are infertile, so it is reasonable to call horses and donkeys different species; they can produce live offspring, but those offspring are a genetic dead end.

      OK, how does that relate to my point? Well, sometime many millennia ago, there were a group of equines that, although not exactly like today's donkeys, were close enough that you would call them donkeys. There was a similar group of "horses". Here's the weird thing: they were the same species (interfertile and producing viable offspring). Somewhere over the millennia since then, the two groups, breeding primarily within their own group and not between groups, reinforced certain traits to the point where cross-group offspring were no longer fertile.

      The question for you: how the heck do you define where speciation occurred? Was it when the (still interfertile) groups started moving apart? Was it the first member of each group that could not produce fertile offspring with more than half the potential mates in the other group? Was it when there was one member of each group which were mutually incapable of producing fertile offspring with any descendents of the other? For that matter, how do you define thr groups themselves? There were probably some fertile proto-mules for a while, which didn't fit cleanly into either group. They either died out without reproducing or were merged back into one of the groups, the line would nonetheless have been somewhat blurry.

      Now, next question: how do you determine, from the fossil record, where that speciation occurred? Which of a bunch of old horse/donkey-skeleton-like rocks (that's all fossils are) was once an animal that gave rise to modern horses which can't produce fertile offspring with modern donkeys? How do you distinguish, from the fossils, that it was X, and not the parents of X, or the children of X, or possibly the specific children of X by Y? How do you distinguish that it was X and not X's sibling that got a slightly different set of chromosomes and was no longer able to produce fertile offspring with his or her corresponding member of the other group, yet went on to breed successfully and pass those chromosomes onto the other members of the group?

      Seriously, demanding to see "direct ancestors" in the fossil record is absolute stupidity. I'm no biologist (as I'm sure any biologist reading my post noted) but I understand enough basic genetics to know that even with genetic evidence it's non-trivial to trace direct ancestry, and without it the task is nearly hopeless. Combine that with the way that most individuals never get fossilized, much less last long enough after fossilization to be found today (never mind the many fossils that we don't have yet; new finds are still occurring). Given all that, it'd be a minor miracle to have gaps of only 1000 generations in a direct chain of ancestry. That's enough generations for some pretty significant changes, when you're looking for incremental differences between a horse and a donkey. 1000 generations ago, your ancestors were recognizably human, but they still looked different enough from you today that you wouldn't have been able to call them a "direct ancestor" or not from fossilized bones - and they were probably still close enough that you'd have been interfertile!

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      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    5. Re:Now there are two gaps .. by c6gunner · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Everyone else kinda jumped on you and decimated most of your comment (cbhacking did a particularly good job), so I'll just take the bit that's left:

      And again, since you're reading comprehension is obviously weak, I never said that the the lack of this evidence is proof that evolution is false. I said that this is a pretty big fucking piece of evidence that we have not found YET and if I even bring it up, I'm instantly ridiculed. It's almost as if I walked into a %place-of-worship% and started saying that %Deity% doesn't exist.

      You're being ridiculed because you clearly don't understand how evolution works, and instead of trying to learn you're going around complaining that there's missing evidence. The fact that you're making comparisons to religion only makes you more worthy of derision.

      If you start saying things like "you know, we have no direct evidence that any Jews were gassed in WW2", what do you think the implication would be there? If you say "We have no hard evidence that Osama Bin Laden was involved with 9/11", what's the implication there? If you go around claiming "You know, nobody on the Earth could ACTUALLY see Apollo 8 on it's way to the Moon", what do you suppose might be the implication there?

      You don't get to make idiotic statements with ominous implications, and then pretend that you're "just asking question". It's dishonest, it's cowardly, and it's fucking annoying. Yes, I know all the conspiracy theorists do it all the time; if they're your role-model, you've got serious issues.

  5. New* Dinosaur Species by FiloEleven · · Score: 4, Funny

    *For very old values of New.

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    Your brain is not a computer.
  6. Evolution is a continuum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The is no such thing as a missing link, because there is no stable state - every new generation is a link to subsequent generations.

  7. Dear USA by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We don't care about your internal sectarian strife between extremist protestant cults and academia, and would like to read interesting comments about the new dinosaur. So far in this thread there have been none, not a one.
    Kind regards
    The rest of the world