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The article mentions they use DNA testing to determine the sex and also that it's tough to find usable DNA samples. Could it be possible that male fossils are m
by hawktheslayer 6y ago
The article mentions they use DNA testing to determine the sex and also that it's tough to find usable DNA samples. Could it be possible that male fossils are more likely to have usable DNA and thus bias the results?
- amelius 6y agoAnother wild guess: X chromosomes degrading into Y chromosomes over time?
- vagrantJin 6y agoThat is wild. Too wild. Jesus.
- orthoxerox 6y agoDon't dinosaurs have WZ and ZZ, like birds?
- gweinberg 6y agoLikely they did, but I don't think we have the DNA to know for sure. Even if we did have some trapped in amber inside insects like in Jurassic Park, we couldn't link to bones. On Land of the Lost "Grumpy" was called he and "Alice" was called she, but I don't think anyone knew their sex for sure. "Alice" was an Allosaurus.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Don't dinosaurs have WZ and ZZ, like birds? Well, the dinosaurs that are alive today do, at least. For other dinosaurs, we've only fairly recently realized we have soft tissue and maybe DNA in lots of fossils. So, maybe, but we don't know yet.
- MereInterest 6y agoY chromosomes being male is species-specific, and so that wouldn't generalize across species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system
- ksk 6y ago>Could it be possible that male fossils are more likely to have usable DNA and thus bias the results? You can't change the hypothesis to match data. We try to avoid doing that in science ;)