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Scientists discovered perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo inside fossilized egg
- throwaway17_17 3y agoI’ve seen this movie, it doesn’t particularly end well for us… But seriously, I can not help but wonder at what types of artifacts and specimens have just been totally lost and will never be randomly found.
- jacquesm 3y agoProbably almost all of it. Taking into account what's left of some of the most durable structures we know about after a few thousand years it stands to reason that most of everything else is gone forever. That's why the older fossil record is so spotty and why almost every find is significant.
- tomohelix 3y agoTime grinds everything to dust. Cartilage-only fishes might have been abundant eons ago and they could be as big as a megalodon or even bigger. But because they didn't have teeth, we will never know of them... A single cell organism somewhere might have hold a miraculous protein or enzyme that test the boundaries of physics or can cure cancer(s). But they are extinct now and we will never know of them. An ancestor of the octopi might have developed intelligence and tool-making. But since we have no way to find records of their civilization, we will never know of them. That is why an extinction of a species is so significant. It means they will disappear forever, never to reappear in the exact same form again. We will forever lose them and never know what secret they might have carried in their genome or biology or life. And yet, there are species going extinct every single day, many of them are due to human...
- oceanplexian 3y ago99.9% of species that ever lived have gone extinct.
- Brajeshwar 3y agoI know, and we all have seen the movies, but I'd love to see dinosaurs come alive. It should no longer be a new and strange thing in today's world. How bad can it get? I will start a new Religion and the Dinosaur(s) will be my God(s).
- irrational 3y agoWell, we already have avian dinosaurs everywhere. Just start breeding them with an eye toward creating non-avian dinosaurs eventually.
- golergka 3y agoLike the ones in Antarctica?
- irrational 3y agoYeah, start with non-flight dinosaurs like penguins, ostriches, and chickens.
- deadbabe 3y agoWe’ll never see them alive, air is too thin now. VR is the next best way.
- checkyoursudo 3y agoDinos need fat air? Because they were so big or?
- pcthrowaway 3y agoThe theory is they needed more oxygen-rich air because the square-cube law means an animal 2X the length, width, height of an elephant has 8X as much mass to deliver oxygen to. The heart can only work so hard, and as far as I know, there has never been a land animal with more than one heart or one set of lungs. I'm not sure if this theory is still accepted though, as it seems the current consensus is that the air was actually less oxygenated during the dinosaurs' lives.
- tomohelix 3y agoOk, to clear things up, what they found was a rock, literally a rock down to the molecular level, that is perfectly shaped as a dinosaur embryo. It reveals some interesting similarities to birds and stuff and good for paleontology. But none of this contain even a miniscule amount of meat or organic material or DNA of a dinosaur. Those already disintegrated aeons ago. DNA half life is around 500 years. After a million years, it would have degraded so bad you literally have nothing left to reconstruct no matter how much sample you discover. If you start with an entire dinosaur, let say 10 tons, and let be generous and have 1% of that being DNA, you get 1e15 copies of the genome, assuming a 10Gb genome. After 25,000 years, you get less than 1 copy left. Now make it 25 millions years... I know this "half-life" term is kind of a misnomer since unlike radioisotope where it is unaffected by environmental conditions, DNA "half-life" can be longer depending on things like temperature and pressure. But still, on the scale of millions of years, it becomes exceedingly improbable that we can find even 1 copy of a dinosaur genome left.
- jacquesm 3y agoThere was this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/possible-dinosaur-dna-has-been-found/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/possible-dinosaur... but it's been pretty quiet afterwards.
- tomohelix 3y agoAs expected honestly. They found "chemical signals" that indicate DNA in the fossil. Such thing can be anything, from contaminations to errorneous readings. To sequence that supposed "DNA" is a whole other level of technology. In fact, it would be so complex that unless they are hiding alien tech somewhere, I dare say we can't do it at all with our current level of technology.
- jacquesm 3y agoIf there is anything at all... it would pretty much require rewriting the book on DNA preservation, given what we know about this right now I'd say 'impossible' but if there ever is any solid evidence to the contrary I'll be more than happy to admit that I was wrong.
- breeze774 3y agoThis discovery happened quite a while ago. Here's a research paper going into a lot more depth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35106456/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35106456/
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago(2023) Study released 2021....research from 2015? A headline & discussion from 2021: Scientists find preserved dinosaur embryo preparing to hatch like a bird https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29645762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29645762
- KevinMS 3y agoLooks like some kind of content farm. And the writing is suspect "The embryo had been sat in the cupboard for over a decade"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sph 3y agoWas Unilad really the best source available for this piece of news?
- ploek 3y ago> As you'd expect, the embryo was only tiny and measured just 27cm long. 27cm is not exactly what I would call tiny. For comparison, this is what Wikipedia has to say on the topic of ostrich eggs: > on average they are 15 cm (5.9 in) long, 13 cm (5.1 in) wide, and weigh 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb) It's almost twice as long. Talk about megafauna. Looking for alternative sources, I found this: > The unhatched dinosaur’s 24-centimetre-long skeleton is curled inside the egg, with its head tucked tightly into its body. The egg is 17 centimetres long and 8 centimetres wide. ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302492-fossilised-dinosaur-embryo-found-exquisitely-preserved-inside-egg/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302492-fossilised-dino... ) Okay, so they were talking about the size of the dinosaur if it stretched out of its curled position inside the egg. The egg meanwhile is a little larger than an ostrich's egg. Still not tiny by any means, but slightly less mindblowing.
- dicytea 3y agoDoes anyone have a clearer picture of the actual fossil? I don't understand why they chose such a terrible angle for what is the centerpiece of the article.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoSo we can all agree that the egg definitely came first then? I mean logically that makes sense as this is an egg which contains something other than a chicken...therefore eggs came before chickens. This is a pretty bird-like dinosaur (since dinos ARE birds in a sense) so eventually a dino descendant laid a chicken.