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A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face
- petarb 4y agoAbsolutely incredible the level of detail in that fossil
- hcrisp 4y agoI remember seeing this in a Nat Geo article back in 2017. More pictures available here: http://www.natgeo.com/nodosaur http://www.natgeo.com/nodosaur
- smusamashah 4y agoThis is pay walled. Where else I can see it's more and clear pictures. I failed to find a face in the original article.
- austinjp 4y agoLink to the header image from article, as far as I can tell since I'm on mobile: https://i.natgeofe.com/n/e5966d6a-e93c-4f3d-839f-a228f34fdb30/nodosaur-fossil-canadian-mine-face.jpg https://i.natgeofe.com/n/e5966d6a-e93c-4f3d-839f-a228f34fdb3...
- httgp 4y agoHoly smokes this looks like it’s straight out of House of the Dragon.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoThat doesn’t sound like high praise! The quality of the CGI on that show leads me to deduce they were short-changed rather badly given the reported production costs.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoWere they ? They do have quite a lot of "dragon footage"...
- jimsmart 4y ago> I failed to find a face in the original article. The second image in the original Ars Technica article shows the side view of its head/face very clearly. According to the caption: its head is still partly enclosed in the concretion it was found in — which IMO gives it the appearance of having its head resting on a rock. After looking at that, and the third image — an artist's rendition of how it might have looked when alive — the first image should make more sense: its snout is at the front of the image, the bulges of both its eye sockets are clearly visible slightly further back, and the creature looks like it is laying down (and has been somewhat flattened) facing towards the camera, looking slightly to the right of the photographer. HTH.
- metadat 4y agoAsk and ye shall receive. JS-free archive link: https://archive.today/NrUsT https://archive.today/NrUsT <3
- 867-5309 4y agoset your VPN to France to bypass the paywall
- raghavkukreti 4y agohttps://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea... clear cookies > refresh works :)
- vwcx 4y agoThe National Geographic journalist left a few interesting comments on HN a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913
- algem 4y agoWhere are the feathers?!? Looks just like a dragon.
- blendergeek 4y agoFrom what I understand, it was more the Therapods that are thought to have had feathers. This is an ankylosaur which was a heavily armored dinosaur.
- anyfoo 4y agoRegardless of whether this specific dinosaur is thought to have feathers or not, I was wondering if feathers would survive the fossilization in the first place? Is there anything intrinsic to feathers that would make them different in that regard, then, say, the skin (which apparently is relatively well preserved)?
- dTal 4y agoFeathers have in fact "survived" fossilization, notably those attached to several whole-body archaeopteryx fossils (scare quotes around "survive" because the original material is gone, it is only the shape which survives)
- Tagbert 4y agoUnder very special preservation circumstances, feathers to fossilize. You can see some examples of dinosaur fossils in this Wikipedia article. If you search you can also find lots of bird feature fossils (avian dinosaurs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur this article is from The NY Times and I am only linking to it because the first photo in that article is an amazing fossil of a feather. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/science/dinosaur-feather-fossil-archaeopteryx.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/science/dinosaur-feather-...
- Groxx 4y agoFor further context: "dinosaurs" covers a time range MUCH longer than the time since they went extinct, i.e. enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve. There was a large variety. An extremely large variety. As much as we are understandably excited about feathers being a thing that we didn't realize earlier, in 100+ million years a lot of things evolve. They didn't all have feathers.
- logicallee 4y agoFor what it's worth, I didn't like reading this article. Something about it seems wrong.
- version_five 4y agoAbout the subject or the writing style? I thought it was an interesting article, especially for ars
- logicallee 4y agoAbout the writing style, for example talking about looking a dinosaur in its "face". It is jarring and I didn't like reading it.
- version_five 4y agoYes ok I see your point. I didn't find it deal breaking but I understand how something like that could be
- satvikpendem 4y agoWhy? Animals have faces too.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoThe only other mention of a face in the article is that that its face was preserved. Is your objection to the “looking into its face” posture, or the notion of it having a face in the first place, or something else?
- kpozin 4y agoSome languages besides English have distinct terms for a human face vs. an animal face. Is that what you're referring to?
- blacksqr 4y agoI resemble that remark!
- diego_moita 4y agoThis fossil is at the Royal Tyrrell Museum[0] in Drumheller, Southern Alberta, Canada. It is by far the best dinossaur museum in the world and also has a fine exhibition on the Burgess Shale, one the best fossil sites in the world for the Cambrian Revolution. The only other claim to fame for the town of Drumheller is the band Nickelback was formed close by. But that's something most Canadians don't like to talk about. [0] https://tyrrellmuseum.com/ https://tyrrellmuseum.com/
- andrewstuart 4y agoIf you type into Google “why does everyone hate” it will autosuggest “nickelback”. I watched a doco once on why everyone hates them. It was interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music.
- echelon 4y ago> I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3rXdeOvhNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3rXdeOvhNE Sorry.
- codetrotter 4y agoThey also have an online shop, with some pretty cool dinosaur t-shirts. https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2 https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2 I came across this online shop somehow a few years ago, and thought it would be hilarious to order from the museum shop of a museum I’ve never even been to, and in a country I haven’t been to either at that. Not sure where I have those dinosaur T-shirts now but I wore them every now and then for a few years at least :) The T-Rex Skeleton T-shirt being my favourite among the ones I bought from there. https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2/products/adt-t-t-bone https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2/pro...
- slavik81 4y agoA few more Drumheller facts: Drumheller was one of the filming locations for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The Star Trek museum originally located in Vulcan, Alberta is now in Drumheller.
- xivzgrev 4y agoSo basically dinosaurs (at least this one) DO look shrink wrapped?
- kloch 4y agoI wouldn't read too much into that, hairless cats and plucked birds look very different from their fully dressed versions.
- unwind 4y agoThis bit: It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours. Is just staggering. I'm old(ish), and not in the frantic startup-race culture that's sometimes pervasive here, but still find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect. Speaking of interesting dinosaur names, my other favorite has got to be the Atlascopcosaurus [1], named after Swedish industry tooling company Atlas Copco [2] who sponsored the particular dig (in 1984) when it was found with equipment. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlascopcosaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlascopcosaurus [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Copco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Copco
- fsloth 4y ago"l find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight." Frankly, this feels like my career right now :D (i.e. kinda senior in an individual contributor role without a daily team collaboratin as such, which means I don't have to run around doing standups, but have gazillion lines of code to maintain and not much time for greenfield development).
- verisimi 4y ago> [I] find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect. Honestly, this seems like a refreshingly honest take on life. Pounding rocks like a convict, is where its at! No?
- lisper 4y agoI've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?
- verisimi 4y ago> “We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Henderson. Surely this is nonsense. You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilised body! I mean, if I drown and my dead body comes to rest deeper than 50 meters, and then several trillion of years later my fossilised body is uncovered with glauconite all over it, you would be wrong to deduce that I swam 50 metres under the sea. > But Brown and his colleagues discovered something completely unexpected: Borealopelta’s coloring may have helped keep it camouflaged in its environment. The team found evidence that the animal used countershading, meaning that the coloration of its body was darker on the top and tapering into a lighter underbelly. Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilised creature? The creature itself is gone - its just stone. You can no more do this, than tell the colour of a man's eyes from his footprint.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> > “We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Henderson. > Surely this is nonsense. It is not, though the problem here seems to be that you have badly misread it. > You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilized body! Probably not, but this isn’t saying anything about the depths that a living creature swam, but the depths to which the corpse of a land-walking creature sank. The three paragraphs before the one you quoted about how far it went (after death, not in life), with some marked ellisions for brevity: A land-based megaherbivore preserved in an ancient seabed is not as uncommon as one might think. […] Scientists suspect its carcass may have been carried from a river to the sea in a flooding event; it may have bobbed at the surface upside-down for a few days before sinking into the ocean depths. It would have been kept at the surface by what’s referred to as “bloat-and-float,” as the buildup of postmortem gasses would keep it buoyant. Modeling done by Henderson indicates its heavy armor would have rolled it onto its back, a position he suspects may have prevented ocean predators from scavenging its carcass. Once the gases that kept it floating were expelled, Borealopelta sank to the ocean floor, landing on its back. > Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilized creature? “One way to determine an organism’s coloration has been to examine the structure of fossilized melanosomes under the microscope. Melanosomes are small storage sacs within cells that store pigment. Two main flavors of pigments are found in animal tissues called eumelanin and pheomelanin.[…] Classically, scientists have examined the microscopic structure to distinguish between eumelanosomes and pheomelanosomes. However, these structures are often difficult to distinguish microscopically and mineralized microbes can often be mistaken for these organelles. […] “The genius of Wogelius and his collaborators was to study the chemistry of eumelanin and pheomelanin from modern surviving organisms and then apply what they found to ancient samples. It turns out that each form of melanin has a distinctive associated element – copper for eumelanin and zinc for pheomelanin. X-ray beams can be bounced off the fossil melanosomes, and the way they are reflected depends on the different elements of these pigments. The exact distribution of eumelanin and pheomelanin can be mapped onto a fossil’s structure, providing something like a ‘paint for numbers’ for the fossils! This technique has already been used to paint a picture of an extinct red mouse that lived 3 million years ago. Now investigators hope to use the technique to go even further back in time to capture pictures of the earliest organisms to roam the planet.” https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/color-dinosaur-actually/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/color-dinosaur-actua...
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- Pelayu 4y agoDinosaurs and the prehistoric era are absolutely fascinating to me. I wonder if there’s a way for a programmer to branch into that world.