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So the headline clearly says "fossil". the word "fossil" comes up in the article. >> Dating of the sediments around the remains suggests it lived about 39 mill

So the headline clearly says "fossil". the word "fossil" comes up in the article. >> Dating of the sediments around the remains suggests it lived about 39 million years ago. ok, so clearly then "not original organic material". But then, >> "Each vertebra weighs over 100kg, which is just completely mind-blowing," said co-worker Dr Rebecca Bennion from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels. If I'm charitable I'm reading this as "The vertebra, when they were made of bone, weigh over 100kg..." ? I mean now that they are _fossils_ (ie ROCK) well, 100kg of rock doesn't really tell me a whole lot. >> "It took several men to shift them out into the middle of the floor in the museum for me to do some 3D scanning. Which makes me think she's talking about the _fossil_ weight. So, implying "they're big fossils"? Not that the bones used to weight this much... then >> The team that drilled into the centre of some of these vertebrae to work out the bone density - the bone was so dense, it broke the drill on the first attempt." So either it's a fossil (aka ROCK) or it's bone. It (apparently?) can't be both.[1] Given that it's rock, drilling into it and breaking the drill bit just tells me it's hard rock. There's more in the article seemingly mixing the term "bones" and "fossils" ("The bones are going on display in Lima to celebrate their description in a scientific journal") I get that this is a "popular science" type article, but is it too much to ask that it use the right words? [1] I checked online, and apparently; "But a buried bone isn't the same thing as a fossil -- to become a fossil, the bone has to become rock. " https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/fossil2.htm#:~:text=While%20the%20dinosaur's%20soft%20parts,and%20fat%2C%20eventually%20break%20down https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geolog.... "Fossils are not the remains of the organism itself! They are rocks." https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/fossil/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/fossil/

nickdothutton 3y ago
BBC Science coverage has been getting worse for about 30 years and is now little more than either tech advertisement (yay! gadgets!)or pulp science / clickbait.
adrian_b 3y ago
Actually the text from your National Geographic link is the one that is more sloppy. The original meaning of the word "fossil", which is still used in various contexts, means anything that is dug up from below the surface of the Earth. During the last two centuries "fossil" became used more frequently with the restricted meaning of remains of ancient living beings. "Fossilization" is any process that has ensured the preservation of such remains. The most frequent form of fossilization is mineralization, which is the transformation of the remains into a rock, but it is not the only kind of fossilization, especially for more recent remains, like fossil amber or the fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits. Some organic molecules have survived even billions of years without being converted into rocks. Your quotation "to become a fossil, the bone has to become rock" is valid only in the most frequent cases, because sometimes a bone becomes a fossil without becoming a rock, e.g. when the animal has been enbalmed (e.g. by tar or resin) or frozen (like many mammoths). You are right however that the article discussed here is annoyingly ambiguous, because it cannot be known whether the hardness and weight are attributes of the original bones or only of the mineralized bones that have been preserved. In any case, the conclusions about the weight of the bones in the living animal were based on studies of the microscopic structure of the bones, not on how many people were needed to carry the fossils.
- eesmith 3y ago
  To add another counter-example, "fossil air" is "A sample of air (for example in the bubbles trapped in an ice core) that preserves the composition of the environment at the time it was deposited." - https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095830490 https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...
ChristianGeek 3y ago
Also, “ Perucetus would have been shorter than the average blue whale but much heavier.”

nickdothutton 3y ago

BBC Science coverage has been getting worse for about 30 years and is now little more than either tech advertisement (yay! gadgets!)or pulp science / clickbait.

adrian_b 3y ago

Actually the text from your National Geographic link is the one that is more sloppy. The original meaning of the word "fossil", which is still used in various contexts, means anything that is dug up from below the surface of the Earth. During the last two centuries "fossil" became used more frequently with the restricted meaning of remains of ancient living beings. "Fossilization" is any process that has ensured the preservation of such remains. The most frequent form of fossilization is mineralization, which is the transformation of the remains into a rock, but it is not the only kind of fossilization, especially for more recent remains, like fossil amber or the fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits. Some organic molecules have survived even billions of years without being converted into rocks. Your quotation "to become a fossil, the bone has to become rock" is valid only in the most frequent cases, because sometimes a bone becomes a fossil without becoming a rock, e.g. when the animal has been enbalmed (e.g. by tar or resin) or frozen (like many mammoths). You are right however that the article discussed here is annoyingly ambiguous, because it cannot be known whether the hardness and weight are attributes of the original bones or only of the mineralized bones that have been preserved. In any case, the conclusions about the weight of the bones in the living animal were based on studies of the microscopic structure of the bones, not on how many people were needed to carry the fossils.

eesmith 3y ago
To add another counter-example, "fossil air" is "A sample of air (for example in the bubbles trapped in an ice core) that preserves the composition of the environment at the time it was deposited." - https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095830490 https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority...

ChristianGeek 3y ago

Also, “ Perucetus would have been shorter than the average blue whale but much heavier.”