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We found the world's oldest modern bird skull
- brandonscott 7y agoSo cool. How many other uninteresting fossils are sitting around waiting to be scanned?
- nn3 7y agoThere's a Ian Banks short story where one of the omnipotent Culture spaceships visits the Earth and scans it on its whole and sees all the fossils every fossilized. I always found this an fascinating thought. Imagine technology progresses so that we can just scan the whole earth, or at least large parts of the surface. Then you could look at everything ever fossilized in one go, and completely change natural history.
- op03 7y agoDo you remember the name? Sometimes I get that feeling looking at the history of large software projects that have been around a while through upgrades, downgrades, branches, growth, layoffs, acquisitions, mergers etc etc. I like the sound of "whole earth scan".
- nn3 7y agoThe state of the earth The fossil scan is just a sentence or so, not really a significant part of the plot.
- throwaway894345 7y agoI'm shocked at how modern this bird looks considering it coexisted with dinosaurs. I thought birds looked more like feathered reptiles at that point, but I guess Archaeopteryx is 125 million years ago (putting the new fossil half way between Arch' and us).
- nerdponx 7y agoFor what it's worth, a lot of theropods, such as the dromaeosaurs and ornithomimids, probably looked like giant birds with teeth. So the confusion goes both ways.
- perl4ever 7y agoThe world's shortest tall person?
- marcosdumay 7y agoBasically that, but fossils are scarce enough that there are few enough known species so it makes sense.
- perl4ever 7y agoIt always "makes sense", but it focuses on the object while the real subject is the definition. I didn't click to see if the article was in fact about the definition of modern.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThe article is about the bird. If you take a look at the images, you'll see it's so different from any bird-dinosaur that an explicit definition isn't necessary.