17 ms·
Scientists find preserved dinosaur embryo preparing to hatch like a bird
- busymom0 5y agoIs it possible to actually get DNA material from such preserved embryos and create dinosaurs again like the jurassic park movies?
- cft 5y agoDNA completely decays after at most 1k years
- busymom0 5y agoIs that true if it was frozen for the entire time?
- steve_adams_86 5y agoWhere would something have stayed frozen for ~65M years? Not a rhetorical question so much as a follow up. I don’t know the answer to your question.
- busymom0 5y agoMostly asking a hypothetical question really. Like there have been Giant camel fossil found in Arctic: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21673940 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21673940
- Sniffnoy 5y agoYou're off by at least an order of magnitude there; we have DNA samples from well further back than that, such as from Neanderthals and from mammoths. But no, it doesn't last long enough to get DNA samples from dinosaurs. I don't know the area well enough to give a good figure, but 1 million years seems to be an upper bound from what I can find quickly.
- mkl 5y agoDNA's half life has been estimated at 521 years [1] in moderate temperatures, so after 1k years a quarter of it would still be left. That must depend on the conditions though. DNA 500,000 years old has been found in ice cores (presumably a higher half life there, since of e.g. the 3 billion base pair human genome, 3e9/2**(500e3/521) ≈ 3.8e-280 would be left after that time with that half life). [1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-life-dna/ https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-li...
- credit_guy 5y agoA DNA molecule is very long, it has of the order of 1 billion nucleotides. You don’t need entire molecules to do the sequencing, just segments. Even if you had the entire molecules, you would start by splitting them up [1]. If you can retrieve enough segments, you might try some sort of Bayesian inference. You start with the DNA of the common ancestor of reptiles and dinosaurs (and therefore birds). You don’t know what it was, but you know that it evolved into the current reptiles and birds via random mutations followed by adaptive selections. You get a posterior for it, then you use it as a prior for the DNA of the dino for which you have sequenced a number of segments. [1] https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/gene-expression-and-regulation/biotechnology/a/dna-sequencing https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/gene-expressi...
- vixen99 5y agoA classic counterexample is "Scientists took 166 bone samples from 151 mummies, dating from approximately 1400 B.C. to A.D. 400, extracting DNA from 90 individuals and mapping the full genome in three cases." as reported (for instance) on https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mummy-dna-genome-heritage/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/22/health/ancient-egypt-mumm...
- fvold 5y agoNo. Chemically speaking, it's a rock. None of the original organic matter is left, it has all been permineralized. https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/paleo/fossilsarchive/permin.html https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/paleo/fossilsarchive/permin.html
- cft 5y agoI wonder if the dinosaurs would have developed intelligence and civilization by now, had it not been for the Chicxulub asteroid?
- jiocrag 5y agoDinosaur brain to body ratios never approached those of even early mammals AFAIK. Human brains are our specialized trait (like a rhino horn or snake venom). Like asking why fish haven’t developed civilization.
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoAnts developed civilization. You don't need brains for that.
- drran 5y agoLook at crows, maybe. https://www.thoughtco.com/crows-are-more-intelligent-than-you-think-4156896 https://www.thoughtco.com/crows-are-more-intelligent-than-yo...
- Twisol 5y agoIt only took our species a few hundred thousand years at most, while it's been hundreds of times longer than that since the dinosaurs went extinct. At the same time, sharks never developed civilization, so who's to say?
- cft 5y agoDinosaurs were the dominant species (including the sea), unlike sharks.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI mean, Dinosaurs weren't a species.
- 5y ago
- fvold 5y agoThis "perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo" is a rock. It's in the perfectly preserved shape of a dinosaur embryo, but chemically, it's a rock. Generally speaking, that's what fossils are. I bet Young Earth Creationists will be quoting this article for decades now. Thanks, Guardian, for the clickbait-y headline. Cheeses.
- BrazzVuvuzela 5y agoIt doesn't matter. YECs would say god created it to test them or the devil created it to trick them, it doesn't matter how precisely or imprecisely you word headlines about dinosaurs they still won't believe it. Stop worrying so much about whatever stupid things they think, you're not going to bring them to sanity around by being super pedantic.
- da-x 5y agoTrue. It is sad that even when science is concerned, actual news sites are fake news generators today.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Tagbert 5y agoBut this is not fake news. You are just using a more narrow definition of “preserved” than the article.
- krisoft 5y agoI don’t understand what you find clickbaity about the title. For reference now when I’m reading the article the title is: “Scientists find perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo preparing to hatch like a bird”. It is a clear and concise description of what the article is about.
- konart 5y agoThe title sound like they have found an embryo in some sort of permafrost with DNA and everything else.
- irrational 5y agoSince birds are dinosaurs, don’t you mean “preparing to hatch like a dinosaur”?
- krisoft 5y agoObviously a dinosaur will hatch like a dinosaur. Thats tautological. The new finding is that that individual dino appeared to be hatching in the same way present day birds do. (As opposed to for example how crocodiles do.) The article states that this behaviour was not previously observed in dinosaur fosils therefore it was not known which way they hatched exactly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 317070 5y agoNo, it says in the article that what is surprising, is that the embryo was lying in the egg like a bird, _not_ like previously found dinosaur embryos, which lied like crocodiles/reptiles. So, it was preparing to hatch like a bird, unlike other dinosaur embryos found before.
- forgotmyoldacc 5y agoParent was making a pedantic comment; birds are a subset of dinosaurs. https://www.livescience.com/are-birds-dinosaurs.html https://www.livescience.com/are-birds-dinosaurs.html
- truculent 5y ago“Like an avian dinosaur” would be the modern terminology, I believe
- Sharlin 5y ago(Edited:) Yes, but that’s just a long-winded way saying ”like a bird”. This dinosaur was not itself a bird because birds evolved only after the K–Pg event.
- verisimi 5y ago
- hetspookjee 5y agoWhy do you have opbjections on a matter you clearly have a lot of questions about how it actually works? Wouldnt it be more fair to openly ask the questions, without objecting to the matter at hand?
- verisimi 5y agoFirstly, I am asking the questions. But, to clarify, I object at the lack of detail that these stories have. Instead, we are simply presented with the result - tada - and we are meant to make 'ooh aah' sounds. A baby chick, curled up, 66 million years old! It _feels_ manipulative. But when you think about what is being suggested there is so much that is simply passed over and not explained. I genuinely am a skeptic, about everything. I want the evidence, I want to know how I can test it, etc. As far as I can tell this just seems like a highly implausible story.
- eesmith 5y ago"These stories" are not scientific publications! We are meant to read the primary literature if we are curious about more details, not simply go "ooh ahh" ... or complain. Here's the primary literature. https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)01487-5 https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)01487-5 Similarly, news articles aren't textbooks on paleontology, if only because otherwise every article on fossils will need to have pages of identical introductory material. You are the most boring kind of skeptic - the one who wants the world to spoon-feed you information until you're happy. If you're a real skeptic, then apply that skepticism to your original questions. You asked: > How would you be able to distinguish it? Why do you think they couldn't be distinguished? Haven't you ever seen a rock with multiple minerals in it, like mica in granite? Or the individual components that make up coquina? > the egg would not likely be egg shaped, imo? Why do you think that? If I read the paper correctly, the rock was mostly made of river sediment. The egg would have been buried, sat for a long time to fossilize (>10K years), and over a much longer period that sediment turned to rock. Why must the fossil, which is a rock by this point, change its shape? > preserved in something like mud I believe that means you didn't read the primary article, which describes the rock as: "red, fluvial, coarse clastic deposit (He et al., 2017), and mainly consists of a red conglomerate and glutenite, interbedded with a small amount of sandstone, siltstone, and locally interspersed tuff. The formation preserves dinosaur bones and eggs, and fossil plants (Department of Geology and Mineral Resources of Jiangxi Province, 1997)." In other words, yes, "something like mud." > it would still be so much less dense than the matter around it You do not understand what fossilization means. By this time the original materials of the egg have been replaced by minerals, preserving the form, but not the original density. > if it is a stone, how were the scientists able to cut open the stone to expose the fossilised skeleton system etc? After the fossilisation process, its all stone, right? Again, have you never seen a stone with multiple minerals in it? The minerals that become the fossil are different than the minerals of the surrounding stone. That means they can be distinguished. They can be hard to tell apart, yes, but as https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bone-vs-stone-how-to-tell-the-difference-62895060/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bone-vs-stone-... comments "fossils are often different in color and smoother than rocks from the same deposit", "A rock ... will be solid, and the inside of the rock will look like the outside. Fossil bone, on the other hand, will probably preserve the internal bone structure", and "The porous nature of some fossil bones will cause it to slightly stick to your tongue if you lick it". And those aren't the only differences. > it's not like archeology where there is material that can be brushed away. Archeology doesn't only brush things away. And in any case, shouldn't you be skeptical that your understanding of archeology is relevant?
- avereveard 5y agothanks for giving us a 600px image here's the study source, with beautiful high res version of the pictures https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)01487-5 https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)01487-5
- loceng 5y agoHere's direct link to pictures of actual egg in link shared above, for those curious: https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachment/c6a63e1d-52cc-4f56-b682-a7eaa188e90f/fx1.jpg https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme... Thanks for sharing this - the imagery that's seemed to have gone viral the other places I surf seems to be an artist's beautiful interpretation /illustration of what the living egg/bird would have potentially looked like - and in vibrant, full colour!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aembleton 5y agoHere's a larger resolution image: https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachment/48bad251-2670-463a-8229-534f440f3d1e/gr1_lrg.jpg https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme...
- dredmorbius 5y agoMy first thoughts on seeing the rendering of the embryo was that 1) it looks like an embryo bird (all the more with feathers depicted), 2) that an infant or juvenile dinosaur might look and act quite birdlike, including feathers (possibly for warmth / thermal regulation, and as camouflage) and hopping, perhaps even some winglike structures and functions of arms, and if that's the case, that 3) birds evolving from dinosaurs might well be a case of neoteny --- not the evolution of new body forms and functions, but the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. And it seems I'm not the first to think so. "How Dinosaurs Shrank and Became Birds" (2015) Not only are birds much smaller than their dinosaur ancestors, they closely resemble dinosaur embryos. Adaptations such as these may have paved the way for modern birds’ distinguishing features, namely their ability to fly and their remarkably agile beaks. The work demonstrates how huge evolutionary changes can result from a series of small evolutionary steps. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dinosaurs-shrank-and-became-birds/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-dinosaurs-shr... And as Steve Brusatte is quoted in TFA: “This little prenatal dinosaur looks just like a baby bird curled in its egg, which is yet more evidence that many features characteristic of today’s birds first evolved in their dinosaur ancestors.” https://newatlas.com/biology/fossilized-embryo-dinosaurs-birds/ https://newatlas.com/biology/fossilized-embryo-dinosaurs-bir... If that's the case, then it's not so much that birds evolved from dinosaurs as that birds are juvenilised dinosaurs, exhibiting characteristics which were once typical of (at least some) dinosaur species.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoLooks like the bird ride from Golden Axe ("chicken leg").
- antattack 5y ago'hatch like a bird' - when millions of years are at play causation vs correlation goes out the window...
- dredmorbius 5y agoThe goal of simile is to afford similarity, not causality. To the point that that's the etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/simile https://www.etymonline.com/word/simile
- zoomablemind 5y ago“This little prenatal dinosaur looks just like a baby bird curled in its egg, which is yet more evidence that many features characteristic of today’s birds first evolved in their dinosaur ancestors.” This gives a strange feeling about having ... a dinosaur on a Thanksgiving table. Well, could be a table topic at least.
- yongjik 5y agoAs depicted by this wonderful comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-08 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-08
- smm11 5y agoI'm sure the feathers fell off after the things hatch. All dinosaurs are feather-less.