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A Dinosaur So Well Preserved It Looks Like a Statue
- DarkTree 9y agoCool blog post about how NatGeo's 3D tour of the fossil was created using Three.js in the browser. https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon/ https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon/
- w3r3c3 9y agomore like humpty dumpty chickens are too fat to move. fuck the east coast. you all got it fucking backwards. god. someone should wash that bitches mouth out with soap
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- m_st 9y agoOriginal post from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913
- mirimir 9y ago> Those hands belonged to technician Mark Mitchell, who compares the process of separating dinosaur from rock to chipping concrete chunks from a surface as soft as compressed talcum powder. It took him 7,000 hours over 5.5 years, during which he did little else. For that reason, the dinosaur carries his name—Borealopelta markmitchelli. (The first half comes from the Latin for “northern shield.”) So basically, preparing a fossil is rather like sculpting a statue. The outline is there, but following it isn't so trivial.
- partycoder 9y agoNote: birds are technically dinosaurs http://tolweb.org/Dinosauria/14883 http://tolweb.org/Dinosauria/14883
- thomasfoster96 9y agoAnd dinosaurs are reptiles, mammals and reptiles are amniotes [1], both amniotes and amphibians are tetrapods, tetrapods are actually fish[2], and there's no such thing as a fish[3]! [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapodomorpha https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapodomorpha [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish
- k__ 9y agoSo we have more in common with all land animals than a fish has with any other fish?
- Retric 9y agoNo, plenty of fish are closely related. There is however a lot more diversity so the extreme cases are far more extreme.
- contingencies 9y agoI've read that we have more in common with fungi than plants.
- benjaminjackman 9y agoI vaguely remebering reading (I think it was in The Selfish Gene) that we are more closely related to salmon than salmon are to sharks.
- btilly 9y agoThis is absolutely true, and to be expected from the fact that the inheritance splits like a tree. For one thing both we and salmon have bones, sharks only have cartilage. But we're more closely related to sharks than either is to the jawless fishes like the hagfish. The hagfish are just plain weird.
- nthcolumn 9y agoHad it before but a different article and photo. Showed this to my daughter who is dino-crazy a few months ago - she went '>gasp< WOW!' genuine agape awe. Amazing. Isn't it fantastic that the operator was trained and cared enough to stop working? It would have been really cool though if prior to expetrification that the block was MRI'ed and a 3D model created from the MRI which could then be 3D printed in schools all over the world.
- goldenkey 9y agohttp://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/nodosaur-3d-interactive-dinosaur-fossil/ http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/nodosaur-...
- tomkat0789 9y agoI wonder if they'll get a good image of the dinosaur's insides! What could they use to see through the rock?
- BartSaM 9y agoActually kudos to the mine workers and mine management for halting operations and letting archaeologists access the site. The cost involved here is enormous with this, so such an operations often decide to ignore the bones instead.
- BostonEnginerd 9y agoI've met some folks involved in quarrying and have heard stories about seeing fossils and blowing them up to avoid stopping work. It's terribly sad and should have large consequences. I'm really glad this mine did it the right way and stopped!
- mikepurvis 9y agoConsequences, yes. But surely it would help to have appropriate positive incentives toward doing the right thing, for example mandated insurance for an archeological event, that pays out in the event that one occurs.
- Cerium 9y agoAlways better to set up a win-win than to try to create fear over getting caught.
- meri_dian 9y agoI wish in the headlining photo a person was standing next to the fossil to give a sense of scale. That thing is probably > 10 feet long! No wonder it took 7000 hours to separate from the rock.
- tyingq 9y agoThere are images with a 10cm scale bar here: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)30808-4 http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)3... The hi res image: http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2102978684/2080439624/gr1_lrg.jpg http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2102978684/2080439624/gr1...
- avenoir 9y agoOriginal discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913
- Dodgeit 9y ago>So paleontologists have debated whether giant dinosaurs had trunks That's my biggest takeaway from the article