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German Paleontologists Find a 'Near-Perfect' Dinosaur Fossil
First time accepted submitter howzit writes "German paleontologists have discovered what they believe is the best-preserved dinosaur skeleton ever found. The flesh-eating member of the theropod subgroup, which walked on its hind legs, is about 98 percent complete, and also includes preserved bits of skin. 'The around 135-million-year-old fossil is of outstanding scientific importance.'"
Obviously, 'scientific made a msiatke, as Eearth was created in 6000 yrs.
Source: Conservapedia
[/irony]
This post was here to show a type of (unexpected) reaction to this type of news nowadays.
I hope they found his saddle so the Creation Museum can update their exhibits.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
It's a Wolpertinger!
what are you going to do with a 135 million year old dinosaur fossil?
Science?
People loan such finds to museums rather than donating outright so that they retain some control over how the find is maintained, displayed, and so on. If the museum does a poor job of maintaining the fossil or puts it in some back closet where the public can't see it, one would like to be able to take it back and loan it to a museum that will treat it better.
Plenty of things are loaned out (See what NASA does alot) simply so they retain their rights over the product while still allowing it to be showcased (recognition) or allowed to be further researched. Generally speaking, this is standard practice for stuff like these. The main reason is, that the person maintain control over who gets to see it and where it's located and under what conditions. One example is that instead of a museum owning it and showing it only in 1 city, a person may loan out the bones to various museums for various period of time allowing for a greater amount of people who will see the fossil.
As for the skin, no idea. Hard to say but it probably has something to do with how well the entire fossil is preserved. It might be such that a condition allows for bits of the skin to be preserved in some form. There is too little information on how and the conditions at which the fossil was found.
They're going to take it to an island off New Zealand and clone it?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The "skin" is still fossilized, but you can see the texture and possibly structure of it. It's not preserved in the way you're thinking. Although, they have found some biological matter preserved in the center of large bones before. T-rex bones, I believe.
A fossil like this is rare and worth a decent amount. Collectors will pay obscene amounts for it, amounts that a museum may not be able to match. So just be happy they loaned it to a museum at all, so at least we can glean some scientific knowledge from it.
... a German satellite fell and broke it to bits... karma sucks!
Truly a beautiful find.
Well considering it's normal for a dead body to be completely "absorbed" by the nature around it in a matter of months, yes this is a very pertinent question to ask.
A fossil like this is rare and worth a decent amount. Collectors will pay obscene amounts for it, amounts that a museum may not be able to match. So just be happy they loaned it to a museum at all, so at least we can glean some scientific knowledge from it.
Some good news on that front, from the article:
"The fossil, discovered between one and two years ago, has been registered as a German cultural asset, giving it a status that drastically lowers its monetary worth, but ensures the artefact will remain in the country.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
If you are going to pretend to be a bible banging fool, shouldn't you spell like one also?
it's very common for artifacts and pcs of artwork to be on loan to a museum or other institution. Typically they are loaned in perpetuity, for a century( or other long period) or until the owner dies, when commonly the item is willed to the museum, or it is willed to another but only if they agree to leave it with the museum. technically, the person or persons who own the object retain ownership but are not responsible for insuring it or for it's upkeep/ repair, that becomes the responsibility of the museum.
If you're not a mathematician, an eight year-old boy, a 12 year-old girl, or a paleontologist you might want to rethink that plan.
ESPECIALLY if you're a lawyer or game warden.
Unless you're a graphic designer working in CMYK, you've got it backwards.
The arms in theropods are like avian wings in that for most species they are in a rigid clapping position. There was a Slashdot article about this some time ago. Actually clapping doesn't quite describe it as you'll find ancient bird fossils have their claws facing forwards just like this one.
The "damaged" hip is actually one of the two main features used to tell a theropod away from other dinosaurs. The theropods ischium is facing backwards, while their illium faces forwards. This is the ancestral configuration, although it was secondarily lost in the species most closely related to birds, which have *both* facing backwards,
Plant-eating Ornithischia, like the Triceratops, on the other hand, evolved that "new" hip configuration much earlier.
10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.
That's like best educated... IN THE USA.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Just remember, feeding politicians to the keas is a bad idea - their natural diet is nuts and the added protein would be bad for them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Some questions the fine article could have answered: * What material was this fossil found in? * Where was it found roughly? * What theories exist for why it was so well preserved?
Best /. thread EV----ER---!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
They're going to take it to an island off New Zealand and clone it?
They declared it a cultural asset so... the fossil can't leave Germany... so no cloning:-(
That's why New Zealand is already working on cloning Moas. Plenty of meat for T Rex and the KFC fast food chains to divide between them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It just so happens that I am studying math at university, nothing in chaos theory though. Wish me luck!
Eat sleep die
For the young earther crowd to say this is just their God testing them.
Plus it's already been established that modern humans date back over 100,000 years now. So I'd say that their 6,000 year old earth theory is complete bunk.
And now, we have evidence of a fossil from 135 Million years ago. It's getting good.
but .. do you know UNIX ?
They declared it a cultural asset
German culture is very old . . . but THAT old? Old like dinosaurs?
"Hey, who y'all callin' my kin-folk dinosaurs!?"
Is it really dinosaur skin that they found? Or dinosaur Lederhosen?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Do you suppose the skin remnants could give a clue to its original color? The common artistic display usually shows these guys as elephant-grey but who knows.
It happens if the dead body is immediately covered by an air tight layer of e.g. sand, tar or mud. So you find many well preserved fossils in former swamps, river banks or tar pits. In this case it seems to have been preserved by sinking in the seabed of the Paratethys, part of the Tethys, which was an ocean between Africa and Eurasia, and whose remainings are the contemporan Mediterran.
Theres a cast on loan to our local museum. Only a handful of substitute bones in it.
feeding politicians to the keas is a bad idea - their natural diet is nuts and the added protein would be bad for them.
Protein bad for them? How about the saturated fats?
Why does it have such a long tail?
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Well, it was found in Bavaria after all. Our state's motto could as well be "Get off my lawn!" - so our traditions might be derived in an unbroken chain from a long lost dinosaur high culture... And, by the way, proper Lederhosen are made from deer skin. Dinosaur leather is for tourists and Prussians. Period. Now get off my lawn! (Or, to put it in proper Bavarian - "Schleich Di!")
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Also.... "loaned" to a museum? For crying out loud, why? Give it to them, sell it to them, or whatever...
The reason is very simple. If you loan it to them then they can't turn around and sell the parts off to make money (fund raising) or decide its not worth the time and just throw it away or do anything that might destroy it. You will basically not get it back unless they say they no longer want it, then you find another museum who might want it.
Even 135million years ago, the top 2% received special treatment, ducking out of fossilization.
IF this is an appropriate correlation, then the environment of deposition is likely to have been an intermittently stratified and anoxic lagoon of brackish water with active deposition of (phytoplanktonic) carbonate. Storm- or flood-driven overturning events are thought to have lead to intermittent depletion of oxygen in surface waters, leading to occasional mass-death events in the marine fossils, which then sink to the seabed which rapidly returns to being anoxic. bodies that fall to the sea floor are slowly buried in very anoxic limestone mud. The most important point is not the mineralogy of the sediment, but it's fine grain size.
That's a first-cut description of the environment of the Solnhofen area, and it's no great stretch to extend 50-odd km. Time (135Ma BP) is suitable too.
Concerning the issues some people raise about the ownership of the specimen ... "Meh". The locals don't express any great concerns over the issue, and certainly don't seem to be expressing any desire to replace their functioning federated law system with a foreign one based on a different interpretation of "right behavior".
Sounds a nice specimen - better than most of the Archy specimens.
(Incidentally, the recent Chinese bird fossil gold mine has come from another anoxic fresh-to brackish lake environment. The precise dating is a little more recent than for Solenhofen, but some formations are probably somewhat older. So really, we're looking for an "Urvogel" somewhat earlier than Archy and probably a 3-way intermediate between Archy, the Chinese "dragons", and an early maniraptorean theropod. Until we find that "Urvogel", at which point we start looking for three more "intermediate fossils")
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"