To be entirely fair, neither is "shark" a single species...
But yes -- my point was that no shark species formed a civilization over that vast period, so it's hard to say whether any dinosaur species would have.
I guess I just felt that there was quite a large number of dinosaur species for civilization to arise in, not to mention they were on land, so it might be weird to say sharks didn't develop civilization over a long period of time given the differences compared.
I guess I do have a tendency to not specify everything but to just leave some things as implied, that said I think the amount of dinosaur species vs. the amount of shark species is strongly implied when saying dinosaurs is not a species in context.
The land thing was not as strongly implied but again one might consider it when thinking yeah dinosaurs aren't a species, neither are sharks but the numbers don't align...hmm,hmm oh yeah and also the dinosaur species covered many more possible environments.
Haha I do that too sometimes. But for perspective, it's quite a leap for me (and it seems most others reading this too), and not at all "strongly implied" by your statement, even in context. I'm sure that chain of inference might be natural and automatic with your style of thinking, but my mind naturally goes down a completely different path when confronted with your initial statement, so it's probably best to elaborate what you're actually implying to avoid miscommunication :)
But the plural of "species" is "species". When you are talking about one species, you say "species". When you are talking about multiple species, like all the species of dinosaurs, you say "species". "Dinosaurs were the dominant species" is correct, talking about multiple species. "Humans are the dominant species" is correct, talking about one species.
Even pre-civilisation humans were having substantial impacts on local landscapes and ecosystems, particularly in terms of out-competing other top predators.
"Civilisation" defined as "having established cities". Arguably much of North America and Australia would be pre-civilisation by this definition. There are some exceptions among Native Americans in North America, but most cultures seem to have been tribal and reasonably nomadic or based in small villages lacking the complex social and economic structures, as well as trade and diplomatic relations associated with cities. Pueblo culture would be the obvious exception, possibly also mound culture (Illinois / Mississippi Valley). This is not an area of expertise for me.
And my point remains that even without signifificant cities or intensive capital, these cultures had profound iimpacts on their landscapes and were clearly an apex species.
I thought dinosaurs were not adapted to aquatic environments? Marine reptiles like mosasaurs, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were not dinosaurs. Spinosaurus, though, was semiaquatic.
Is it inevitable that given enough time, the dominant life form in a sufficiently hospitable environment will develop higher intelligence and civilization? I'm not sure we know whether that's the case or not.
“Dominant life form” is not really a well defined concept.
I assume you would say humans are the dominant life form of the present day earth, and many would agree with that. Ants are more numerous, cattle and antarctic krill are heavier by biomass so clearly such simple metrics are not what we are after.
And clearly back when humans started developing “higher inteligence” they were just funny monkeys running around the savana harased by jackals left and right. Very much not a “dominant life form” in any sense of the word. One could attribute any special significance to them only in hindsight by what they become, rather than what they were.
True, more a matter of the intelligence resulting in dominance than the reverse. I think you could define dominant as, basically, top of the food chain - able to kill any other animal it wishes to, and able to defend itself from all others. It would certainly be possible to be dominant without high intelligence, but it seems unlikely it would be possible to be dominant over a competitor that has a significant intelligence advantage, assuming the competitor survives long enough to exploit it.
But the question is, does that mean that if such an evolutionary path is possible in a given environment, it will always eventually occur? My guess would be yes, but I'm certainly not 100% confident. ('Eventually' meaning, say, within a hundred million years. Presumably given infinite time, everything possible would occur, so that's not really interesting.)
This is true. Even though some species excel in certain areas (beavers are good at building, dolphins can communicate), no other species come close to human intelligence.
We don't know if there's some special sauce that makes humans unique.
Life has existed on Earth for at least 4 billion years --- it seems to have emerged within 500 million years of the planet's initial formation.
Complex life --- multicellular life with differentiated structures --- took another 3.4 billion years to form, emerging only about 600 million years ago.
Much of the biological hardware and processes for intelligence seems to have emerged with the first mammals (~200 million years ago), particularly emotional-hormonal systems that seem broadly common. It still took most of the intervening time for clever apes to emerge (about 2 million years ago), with anatomically modern humans showing up 200,000 years ago. When language developed isn't clear, but likely by degrees somewhere between 2 million and 50,000 years ago.
(There's a great presentation on the anthropological evidence of complex thinking in this 2012 presentation by Sander van der Leeuw: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug 69 minutes, most of the meat is in the first 20--30 minutes, high-density information.)
And modern technological society is really about 200 years old, with "peak invention" being variously defined, but the 50 to 100 years beginning about 1875 would be a good choice.
So: over 4.6 billion years, life has existed for over 4 billion, and developed complex and technological intelligence only within the past 1 million years, and quite possibly substantially less. That's 0.02% of the total time.
Earth itself will remain generally habitable for only about another 800 million years. If humans or other intelligent species survive over that period, they'll still account for less than 15% of the history of life on Earth.
Considering intelligence to be inevitable is ... somewhat poorly supported, at least based on that timeline.
(Related, see the Drake Equation, and yes, we're working with a single sample study and numerous unknowns.)
That's starting from a point almost at the finish line, with intelligent social dexterous tool-using fire-making apes. Really it took our species about 4 billion years. Every other living species has had just as long, and hasn't developed civilisation. There's every reason to think that the extinct dinosaurs, given 66 million more years, would be like every other non-human species.
Dinosaur 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.
For us, as intelligent species which have a civilisation, we have:
1. Ability to predict future
2. Language. This enables sharing group knowledge.
3. Abstract ideas. This has overlap to language.
4. Use of tools.
The use of tools is relevant to building a civilisation after developing intelligence. To give an example why it matters, reflect how many tools are relevant to us today or centuries ago. For example,
which a more efficient transport - an eagle gliding is more efficient than a human walking. But a human using a wheel (bicycle) is more efficient. The use of wheels, controlled fire, stakes, controlled microclimate through clothes derives from the use of tools.
Given the above list, we can see that sharks and dolphins do not use tools. They have some use of language and share knowledge. They do not use tools as they are not suited for it in the water. Humans have hands which enable them to operate on multiple surfaces.
Perhaps an octopus can developer higher intelligence and a civilisation? Note civilisation requires an intelligence, but it is a superset of intelligence.
Note that for any species developing intelligence and civilisation is a very energy consuming process. In a human the brain is a very power-hungry organ. Its purpose is to enable a better survival for the species it operates in. On an evolutionary scale, for humans and mammals, the brain structure we see today developed over multiple millennia - it was not a one-shot change, but going from a local minima to another local minima, if we are using optimisation language.
Going back to the octopus - perhaps it’s brain does the job done; now and then an evolutionary change might occur to develop an even more organised brain. If it works for the species, the change propagates. But if the change lowers the survival rate of the octopus due to the higher energy usage or complexity of operating a high brain - then the change will not propagate to next generation.
There is a last question, back to the dinosaurs - perhaps there was a civilisation at one of the multiple dinosaur die-offs - but most of its artefacts are wiped out? What evidence do we really have that there was not a civilisation before ours?
"In Shark Bay, Western Australia, bottlenose dolphins Tursiops sp. carry conical sponges Echinodictyum mesenterinum on their rostra in the only documented cetacean foraging behaviour using a tool" - https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v444/p143-153/
Also, octopuses: "The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds [1]. Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed." - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
Lastly, your terrestrial experience might limit your understanding of what a 'tool' might be: "tool users in water often use other animals (and their products) and water itself as a tool ... Octopodes, as well as squids and cuttlefishes, also use water as a tool for protection by using jets of water to aid in burrowing for camouflage ... Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) singly and collectively expel bubbles to create nets that encircle, contain and concentrate schooling prey for easy gulping " - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
Intelligence and civilisation is not the goal of life or evolution. As long as the species is able to reproduce and is not cornered into a situation that requires adaption (as our predecessors once were) they can stay unchanged or without developing higher intelligence. Intelligence is just another tool that can be used to preserve life.
Intelligence is indeed just one tool. But as we see, maybe one of the best tools after a critical point. So it could be expected that after a while, evolution does converge to create intelligent beings who are able to control the environment and other species and even themselves, and with it, be the most successful of them all.
Your notion of success is a human one. Evolution doesn't care. When you reproduce before you die, you're successful.
Intelligence is in no way the best tool to guarantee reproduction, there's absolutely no inevitability to it. Grass reproduces just fine without intelligence. There's species practically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
There is no evolutionary plan or roadmap, it's random mutations.
Basically every other species reproduces only because we allow them to and it benefits us. If we were ever existentially threatened by a competitor, we would eradicate it from existence before it even became a legitimate threat. Single-cell organisms and viruses are the only things we struggle with totally eliminating for our benefit, but we're working on it.
I agree that there's no plan or roadmap, so maybe I was not clear in my wording. What I mean is that given infinite time, a smart species will tend to emerge, and when it does, it will be the most successful one. So evolution (by random chance) converges to higher intelligence.
I remember reading an article (probably linked from here), that said that, in a few million years, the only sign of our own civilization would be marbles.
It’s not impossible that they did have a civilization, of sorts, and all traces have been wiped.
Dinosaurs survived and are still with us as birds. They didn't evolve "civilization" but some have some intelligence, as we can see with ravens and crows which have complex problem and puzzle solving abilities and complex social structures.
Dinosaurs lived on Earth for about 170 millions years. Homo appeared on earth ~3 millions years ago, it doesnt say that they wouldnt but probably not.
Intelligence and civilization is not the pinnacle of evolution considering all the species that lived, live and will live without developing it. It's rather an oddity in the story of life.
I'd argue that it's requisite complexity, with a constraint against excessive complexity.
Complexity affords efficiency advantages, though usually with a resilience cost. Over the period in which that advantage exists, it's beneficial. A sufficient shock could (and frequently has) greatly negated the benefits of complexity.
Occam's Razor: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Ashby's "Requisite variety" (I'm not aware of a concise or elegant formulation) is another.
"This law (of which Shannon's theorem 10 relating to the suppression of noise is a special case) says that if a certain quantity of disturbance is prevented by a regulator from reaching some essential variables, then that regulator must be capable of exerting at least that quantity of selection."
It's been adapted as well to a "law of requisite complexity", which effectively states that only complexity can manage complexity, or alternatively, that the complexity of a control system should correspond to the controlled system. See "Complexity and Organization–Environment Relations: Revisiting Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety" by Max Boisot and Bill McKelvey.
There's also the phenomenon of vestigal functions in biology, e.g., sightless insects, fish, and animals found in cave environments, and even of eukaryotic organisms in which mitochondria once existed (a near-universal characteristic of eukaryotic life), but have since disappeared. (Their earlier presence can be inferred by relic genetic traces.) These are cases in which a previously evolved capability no longer provides a fitness advantage, and revert, typically through a process of genetic drift.
In at least some cases, the mechanism for this appears to be that not having the capability actually affords a fitness benefit. The optical system in animals consumes a substantial fraction of neurological power, and in food-scarce environments in which sight conveys no advantage, the lack of a functioning visual system reduces overall caloric requirements. That is, there is a metabolic energy constraint on fitness and complexity. I'm not aware of a named principle that captures this.
And I've suggested a possible heuristic for distinguishing between rare, false (misinnterpreted), and faked (intentionally misleading) phenomena that seems somewhat related, though it's based on perception thresholds:
You'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.
DNA'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).
A 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.
"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-mumm...
I 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.
It sounds like you have an objection with the term “perfectly preserved”?
Words can have different meanings in different contexts.
In the context of dinosaurs “perfectly preserved” means that even fine details can be discerned in the fossils. And yes fossils are rocks. Someone who knows the minimal amount about dinos will know this, and even if it’s the first time you encounter the concept the article explains it nicely.
Titles are titles. They are short and thus they can’t provide a treatrise on the sum of all human knowledge. You need common sense to parse them.
You can't see the picture unless you click the link though. My point in that the title should be give better information even without the article itself.
That meaning's become confounded with the sense of "fossilised" as in "mineralised", but the original etymology referred to anything dug from the ground, hence coal as a fossil (that is, dug-from-the-Earth) fuel, a nomenclature later passed on to petroleum and natural gas.
I think the title is fine but they are right I will be seeing this article shared on Facebook in a day or so and people will assume they mean it was preserved as an organism not turned into a rock. I knew what they meant from the title and I’m sure so will most intellectually inclined individuals but there is a huge market of people who eat up pop sci (or their titles at least) articles and it perpetuates fake science even if the article isn’t actually doing that.
It’s basically like those articles that say “scientist proves existence of higher dimensions” where everyone who tends to read scientific literature figures they mean “has solved some physics equation using 4 dimensions instead of 3” but the majority who see it only through popsci articles and groups think the scientist has found physical evidence of another universe.
>Words can have different meanings in different contexts.
Sure. It would be much better to put it as "perfectly preserved fossil" or something like that.
I understand that for people who read articles about “perfectly preserved” dinosaurs often this instantly means "fine details can be discerned in the fossils", but for the majority of people who saw the title while scrolling the news feed - this means much more.
I've seen this news shared through various forums at least 5-6 times and not once did I think it's an actual dinosaur embryo! Sure, science reporting, especially the headlines in mainstream media, can be much better but I'm not sure that's the case here
You didn’t, but millions of people when they see the headline on social media. Still don’t think it’s a bad title though, just would be nice if we could guarantee people read the actual articles when we know most don’t.
Many clickbait articles include both a clickbait title and a clickbait picture. The picture included in the article gives context to the meaning of perfectly preserved.
Many social media platforms allow the picture to be included in post. This article wouldn't be clickbait on one of those. This is only a problem on platforms like HN.
Because "preserved" implies keeping something in it's pristine or natural state. This is a fossil. My immediate thought was it was "preserved" in amber.
In any case, the sub-title declares it as a fossil, which is more accurate.
Would you like to challenge the British Geological Survey on their definition of a fossil?
"Fossils are the preserved remains of plants and animals whose bodies were buried in sediments, such as sand and mud, under ancient seas, lakes and rivers."[0]
Or the Natural History Museum:
"A fossil is physical evidence of a prehistoric plant or animal. This may be their preserved remains or other traces, such as marks they made in the ground while they were alive."[1]
[1]: A fossil is physical evidence of a prehistoric plant or animal. This may be their preserved remains or other traces, such as marks they made in the ground while they were alive.
> The specimen was one of several egg fossils that were forgotten in storage for decades.
Found in storage. Doesn't make it clickbaity, but...
> The research team suspected they may contain unborn dinosaurs, and scraped off part of Baby Yingliang’s eggshell to uncover the embryo hidden within.
...makes me wonder about their paleontology practices.
You may have a point, but giving the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they were just targeting the headline to people who understand what "perfectly preserved" realistically means in the context of dinosaur fossils. I certainly didn't consider upon reading it that they'd discovered a viable dinosaur embryo.
High levels of preservation of just about anything 60--80 million years old is rare and unexpected.
Tyrannosaurus Rex is amongst the most iconic of all dinosaurs. All knowledge we have of them comes from 18 known specimens. Of those, only 8 are 50% or more complete. "Sue", one of the best preserved examples, discovered in 1990, is 85% complete. The "dueling dinosaur" specimen (found locked in battle with a Tricerotops) is 98% complete, the most perfect yet found, discovered in 2006.
These finds are rare, they're often very partial, they're often distorted by geological processes. For example, Sue's skill is deformed due to movement of the substrates it was entombed in, a fabricated replica correcting this distortion is used on the mounted display at the Chicago Field Museum, the original is displayed separately.
A "perfectly preserved" specimen is one that is intact, in its original arrangement, not damaged, and not distorted or scattered over the landscape (or more accurately, across the strata in which it was buried).
Some respect for the time, processes, and good fortune involved here would be appropriate.
I don't think that's a comprehensive list, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#Resurgent_intere... mentions that 42 skeletons have been found in western North America. I don't have the page number, but I also remember reading in Steve Brusatte's "The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs" that there are some areas where T. rex's were so common that you can find teeth relatively easily.
Agreed that findings this well preserved are incredibly rare and fortunate.
Fair point on comprehensiveness. I think I'd meant to write "Wikipedia lists 18...", but lost that compiling the comment.
Point remains, though, that for a species (or possibly family) that existed on Earth for a few million years (Wikipedia gives 68--66 mya, so only 2 million years, same article you cite) ... has turned up probably fewer than 100 surviving specimens, out of an estimated total 2.5 billions which had ever existed. That's literally a one-in-amillion chance of fossilisation, preservation, and discovery, so far.
It 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.
And now the top thread is a pointless pedantic bun fight about precise use of perfectly acceptable terminology in the headline. Again. To no good purpose whatsoever.
They should really add an HN guideline that title pedantry is discouraged. This is the fourth article I’ve jumped in the comments just today to find the top thread is about debating some word or other in the title.
Obviously 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.
No, 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.
(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.
Yeah, but not the other way around. But there’s semantic ambiguity with the term “avian” – I used it to mean “capable of flight” but it can also mean “member of the clade Aves”. The dinos that survived were not flying at that time , and not all survivors were in Aves; flight evolved in Aves only after K–Pg and other dinos that survived went extinct later.
That does not jibe with my reading. Which is that there were certainly flightless birds that survived K-Pg (Palaeognathae, ostrich ancestors) and the dominant flying dinosaurs (Enantiornithes) died off, but Neognathae survived and was flight-capable.
Sure, there would necessarily have to be pre-K-Pg avians for them to have been the only ones that survived. I just don't see how one could characterize surviving dinosaurs as non-avian in any way, but they apparently meant non-flying.
Birds are dinosaurs, but dinosaurs are not birds. If the article were about a fossilized mammalian embryo being born like a dog, you wouldn't say "since dogs are mammals, don't you mean born like a mammal?".
You seem to be getting confused by Wikipedia’s treatment of lists of taxonomic categories, where it randomly excludes levels (particularly in sequences of clades) in the middle. If you read the actual description of taxonomic categories, or follow the chain, or use a source which doesn't randomly omit levels in lists, or consider why Dinosauria and one particular branch at every level below it is not marked extinct, you would see that you are wrong.
Why 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?
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.
"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.
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-... 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?
> 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?
Do you really believe that an egg can sit in mud for 10,000 years and not degrade?
> The formation preserves dinosaur bones and eggs, and fossil plants
It sounds like we have a genuine slice of pre-history. If they had said that they had preserved an insect being eaten by a chick being eaten by a dinosaur - ie 3-in-1 - would you believe that too? At what point do you try to establish your understanding with information that aligns to your experience?
>> 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.
An egg is mainly fluid, right? From what you say, you seem to think that the fluid would a/ stay in the egg for 10,000 years and then b/ be converted to solid stone. Is this really a plausible argument?
You provide an example of how much trust there is in the purported authoritative sources, even though they are impossible to believe.
If I said to you I had a 20 year old egg, that I had preserved on my bookcase, that it still had liquid in it - you would think we a fool or a liar. But a 10,000 year old egg in mud? No problem!
You have yet to used your skepticism to analyze your own arguments. If your understanding is wrong, then your conclusion about what is possible to belief is likely also wrong.
For example, you still haven't explained why you think any fossil rock should be uniform, with no way to distinguish between fossilized bone and its surrounding matrix.
> you would think we a fool or a liar
No. Again, use your skepticism on yourself.
My first thought is that you sealed the egg, heated it up to kill any bacteria (but below 60C, which is when the egg white starts to congeal) and then ... let it sit for 20 years. No bacteria can come in. No fluid can go out. Why couldn't there be liquid after 20 years?
My second thought is you had it in a jar of lime water, which is an old way to preserve eggs, yes, even for years. https://theoldwalshfarm.com/water-glassing-eggs/ claims still edible after 2 years, so I can believe still with liquid after 20.
So we know that eggs can last for years, with liquid inside.
Why are you so trusting in the correctness of your beliefs?
And the claim isn't even that the egg was hermetically sealed in order to be fossilized. Over time the content of the egg is replaced with groundwater, while in an environment that doesn't easily support organic decay.
Which we know exists, as we've found 2,000 year old bodies in bogs, and the rock formation the fossil was in indicates a fluvial environment.
> Like I said, you clearly don't understand fossilization.
That's right - I don't. I don't understand how an egg can remain unfossilised yet intact with liquid in for 10,000 years. You do apparently.
> claims still edible after 2 years, so I can believe still with liquid after 20.
Yes - while I used 20 to illustrate the ridiculous point you are making, you actually said greater than 10,000.
> You have yet to used your skepticism to analyze your own arguments. If your understanding is wrong, then your conclusion about what is possible to belief is likely also wrong.
and
> use your skepticism on yourself.
That's not how it works. I'm not making the claim that eggs can last for thousands of years, without degrading, then be converted to stone, then be found millions of years later, then be opened up (somehow!) to reveal the stone 'skeleton' inside of the creature inside. It is fine for me to be skeptical. I'm asking for evidence of these outlandish claims. I don't think there is any.
You think you do understand fossilisation etc - so much that you accept the story above. Feel free to explain it in more detail, or how and why you started to believe these sorts of claims. I'm especially interested to hear how you verified what was said.
> Why are you so trusting in the correctness of your beliefs?
I'm not trusting anything - I even think my experience can be wrong. But the argument I am making aligns with common place understanding. You would leave an egg in some mud and come back 1-2 years later to find it as you left it, right? I'm saying the same rules apply to everything - saying 'millions of years' or whatever shouldn't mean reasoning is deferred. What are you trusting?
Since you haven't bothered to come to grips with the information available about fossilization - neither that written by experts in the field, and meant for a lay public, nor even the relevant Wikipedia entries - I'm not going to spoon-feed you my much less limited understanding.
You aren't skeptical. You're making boring internet arguments.
You might not believe me, but these are genuinely held opinions.
I know there are 'experts' and lots of information, but I don't think all that is anything more than a talking shop. The information can be steered, be wrong, etc. Eg there are huge bodies of scriptural works, phrenology was a thing once, etc, etc - was that right just because it exists? Just because there is lots written doesn't mean I have to invest half a lifetime to get to grips with whatever is being discussed. Either it makes sense, or it doesn't.
Instead I take a simple position - if I don't have verified experience of whatever-it-is I take a closer look. I ask - what are the claims, what is the evidence. I'm not trusting that someone else has 'got this' even if they are credentialed.
Its illuminating. If nothing else, it illuminates just how little knowledge other people have on the subject, and yet they like to pretend they are an authority! And these pretenders will group together and dismiss the man but not the argument.
Anyway, if I've given you pause for thought, that's great.
> That's right - I don't. I don't understand how an egg can remain unfossilised yet intact with liquid in for 10,000 years. You do apparently.
There's these things called books, there's even a thing called Wikipedia with a specific article to get you started[0]. Why are you being so vexatious?
I see the pictures of fish etc on the provided link. Again, I don't understand how this could be preserved on the surface of a rock, or on mud, etc.
In your experience, have ever seen some biological matter rest somewhere, without decaying? Have you ever dug into the ground or mud and found a bone there? The closest I come to that is when I step in mud, and a stick is underneath... but this would be frail and degraded. In all my experience biological matter is broken down very quickly.
“ These formations may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying the decomposition of both gross and fine biological features until long after a durable impression was created in the surrounding matrix.”
From the linked Wikipedia page.
In many places, it is indeed impossible for fossils to form (for example, rainforests) due to various environmental factors. But in some places, fossils do in fact form, as evidenced by the fact that we have fossils.
> But in some places, fossils do in fact form, as evidenced by the fact that we have fossils.
Yes :) But you realise you are accepting what you are told to say that?
Are there any other possibilities though, to explain what we see as fossils? Is it possible that these photos are faked, or that the fossils themselves are faked? Or that they are real skeletons, but the story around them is wrong? Eg perhaps the fish was placed on the wall last year, and that is the mark it left.
I think it is clear that there are other possibilities. I think I can also make a case for them being more plausible than the story.
Regardless, we will not gain knowledge by accepting what we are told unconditionally - we should be personally verifying. Unless we have personally verified something, we cannot say "I know". We can I can say "I read" or "I believe" or "it is my hypothesis that". But it is not possible to truthfully say "I know".
> Under Last Thursdayism, books, fossils, light already on the way from distant stars, and literally everything (including your memories of the time before last Thursday) were all formed at the time of creation (last Thursday) in a state such that they appear much older.
> Last Thursdayism functions both as a philosophical point on how our observations may not match with "reality" and a reductio ad absurdum of the young-Earth creationist idea of the omphalos hypothesis: if the world was created 6,000 years ago with the appearance of being made billions of years ago, what is there to stop us from claiming it was made Last Thursday?
It's boring.
Yes, there are other possibilities - the universe could have been created Last Thursday.
> I think I can also make a case for them being more plausible than the story.
And Last Thursdayists make the case that Last Thursdayism is more plausible than the usual cosmology.
So, go ahead and do it.
> Unless we have personally verified something, we cannot say "I know".
Have you personally verified that North Dakota exists? That New Zealand exists?
If you want a discussion about solipsism, go bother some philosophers.
I understand your point - but there is a real point to what I'm saying. The fact is that no one is actually checking anything. Its all based on trust.
I know. Its dull, but you need to verify information before you actively promote or parrot it. Its the scientific method, and it should be applied personally. You cannot "know" unless you verify personally. You can trust, believe, etc but not know. If you say 'I know' without having verified whatever-it-is, you are in fact (unintentionally, perhaps) lying.
> It's boring.
Another way of responding is that the truth may in fact be boring. It might not be possible to say anything meaningful about stuff, especially when that stuff relates to events that may (or may not) have happened 66 million years ago.
Just because its boring, and there is not much to know, should we accept any old story that purports to explain things? Is that reason? Is it religious/magical thinking? Would it better to say 'I don't know'?
1. There is a long record of fossils as they are quite common. The old Greeks found marine fossils on land and deduced that land was once under water. The ancient Chinese documented them to be dragon bones.
2. How wide do you expect the fossil-conspiracy to be? This specimen was found in China by Chinese, surely they don't care about western evolutionists?
3. Have you never ever seen or found a fossil yourself? If you use sedimentary rock as wall cover you will get a fossil sooner or later.
4. Or go treasure hunting other coasts. Here is a video of a guy collecting fossilized ammonites in Ireland. I link to the timestamp he is opening a rock. If this is fake how do you think it was done?
And if you watch the whole video you see other fossils in the big stones themselves. To reiterate: You can visit these places! Fossils are quite common.
And it isn't that the organic material doesn't decay, but that fossilization occurs before substantial decay. The first paragraph in the Lagerstätte page even says:
> These formations may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying the decomposition of both gross and fine biological features until long after a durable impression was created in the surrounding matrix.
so, no, they weren't "preserved on the surface of a rock", but buried, then fossilized.
In the fish image, the upper layer then forms its own layer of stone. In the Green River Formation, the split fish layer can "easily split along the layers to reveal the fossils" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Formation
If you don't understand the topic, that's fine. But to reject a description under the guise of skepticism, without honestly engaging in the material, is not.
I actually think it is possible for a body to be buried in a bog, and perhaps be in reasonable condition after 100s of years.
Do you think an egg would last though? For 1000 years (as per another commentor), until it fossilises? And then not be assimilated into the rock that it is surrounded by? And then be found? And then be cracked open to reveal the skeleton inside?
Yep, someone 100+ years ago faked the record and therefore we can't trust anything at all ever. No-sir-ee Bob! The Young Earth Creationists are right, and I'll use the Bible as my sole source of truth. /s
It was not cracked open. Strawman exaggeration for effect is how rhetoric got a bad name.
> Can I get some odds on that please
Yes, it's low. Shall I pull a number out of my ass and say 1 in a trillion?
Now, can I get an estimate on the number of eggs laid in a 100 million year period?
I'll pull another number of my ass and say a population of 10 billion egg-laying creatures, living 10 years, with 10% of eggs making it to adulthood. That's 10 billion eggs per year, I think. Times 100 million years = 1 quintillion eggs that might be fossilized.
Times 1 in a trillion gives 1 million fossilized eggs.
Of which only a small fraction are found.
So your problem with the odds are ... what exactly? That you're not used to thinking about rare events across geologic time?
It’s fine to be skeptical and ask questions, but you’re asking a bunch of questions that palaeontologists have figured out years ago. I suggest you take some time to understand the details if you’re truly interested.
I suspect you may be coming from a place of mistrust in science? It’s not a good position to be in as you’re missing out on a lot of the world if you can’t enjoy this kind of thing.
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!
My 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.
“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.”
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.
“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.
158 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadAt the same time, sharks never developed civilization, so who's to say?
But yes -- my point was that no shark species formed a civilization over that vast period, so it's hard to say whether any dinosaur species would have.
If your intent is to educate HN on the difference between species, genus, family, order, ..., perhaps do so more constructively?
But I suppose you didn't understand what I meant.
The land thing was not as strongly implied but again one might consider it when thinking yeah dinosaurs aren't a species, neither are sharks but the numbers don't align...hmm,hmm oh yeah and also the dinosaur species covered many more possible environments.
"Civilisation" defined as "having established cities". Arguably much of North America and Australia would be pre-civilisation by this definition. There are some exceptions among Native Americans in North America, but most cultures seem to have been tribal and reasonably nomadic or based in small villages lacking the complex social and economic structures, as well as trade and diplomatic relations associated with cities. Pueblo culture would be the obvious exception, possibly also mound culture (Illinois / Mississippi Valley). This is not an area of expertise for me.
And my point remains that even without signifificant cities or intensive capital, these cultures had profound iimpacts on their landscapes and were clearly an apex species.
I assume you would say humans are the dominant life form of the present day earth, and many would agree with that. Ants are more numerous, cattle and antarctic krill are heavier by biomass so clearly such simple metrics are not what we are after.
And clearly back when humans started developing “higher inteligence” they were just funny monkeys running around the savana harased by jackals left and right. Very much not a “dominant life form” in any sense of the word. One could attribute any special significance to them only in hindsight by what they become, rather than what they were.
But the question is, does that mean that if such an evolutionary path is possible in a given environment, it will always eventually occur? My guess would be yes, but I'm certainly not 100% confident. ('Eventually' meaning, say, within a hundred million years. Presumably given infinite time, everything possible would occur, so that's not really interesting.)
We don't know if there's some special sauce that makes humans unique.
Complex life --- multicellular life with differentiated structures --- took another 3.4 billion years to form, emerging only about 600 million years ago.
Much of the biological hardware and processes for intelligence seems to have emerged with the first mammals (~200 million years ago), particularly emotional-hormonal systems that seem broadly common. It still took most of the intervening time for clever apes to emerge (about 2 million years ago), with anatomically modern humans showing up 200,000 years ago. When language developed isn't clear, but likely by degrees somewhere between 2 million and 50,000 years ago.
(There's a great presentation on the anthropological evidence of complex thinking in this 2012 presentation by Sander van der Leeuw: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug 69 minutes, most of the meat is in the first 20--30 minutes, high-density information.)
And modern technological society is really about 200 years old, with "peak invention" being variously defined, but the 50 to 100 years beginning about 1875 would be a good choice.
So: over 4.6 billion years, life has existed for over 4 billion, and developed complex and technological intelligence only within the past 1 million years, and quite possibly substantially less. That's 0.02% of the total time.
Earth itself will remain generally habitable for only about another 800 million years. If humans or other intelligent species survive over that period, they'll still account for less than 15% of the history of life on Earth.
Considering intelligence to be inevitable is ... somewhat poorly supported, at least based on that timeline.
(Related, see the Drake Equation, and yes, we're working with a single sample study and numerous unknowns.)
[0] https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/32/2/406/1054064
The use of tools is relevant to building a civilisation after developing intelligence. To give an example why it matters, reflect how many tools are relevant to us today or centuries ago. For example, which a more efficient transport - an eagle gliding is more efficient than a human walking. But a human using a wheel (bicycle) is more efficient. The use of wheels, controlled fire, stakes, controlled microclimate through clothes derives from the use of tools.
Given the above list, we can see that sharks and dolphins do not use tools. They have some use of language and share knowledge. They do not use tools as they are not suited for it in the water. Humans have hands which enable them to operate on multiple surfaces. Perhaps an octopus can developer higher intelligence and a civilisation? Note civilisation requires an intelligence, but it is a superset of intelligence.
Note that for any species developing intelligence and civilisation is a very energy consuming process. In a human the brain is a very power-hungry organ. Its purpose is to enable a better survival for the species it operates in. On an evolutionary scale, for humans and mammals, the brain structure we see today developed over multiple millennia - it was not a one-shot change, but going from a local minima to another local minima, if we are using optimisation language.
Going back to the octopus - perhaps it’s brain does the job done; now and then an evolutionary change might occur to develop an even more organised brain. If it works for the species, the change propagates. But if the change lowers the survival rate of the octopus due to the higher energy usage or complexity of operating a high brain - then the change will not propagate to next generation.
There is a last question, back to the dinosaurs - perhaps there was a civilisation at one of the multiple dinosaur die-offs - but most of its artefacts are wiped out? What evidence do we really have that there was not a civilisation before ours?
References: 1. Antonion Damasio. Descartes Error. 2. Adam Frank. Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans? https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/557180/
3. A book on Aikido, which I cannot find.
"In Shark Bay, Western Australia, bottlenose dolphins Tursiops sp. carry conical sponges Echinodictyum mesenterinum on their rostra in the only documented cetacean foraging behaviour using a tool" - https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v444/p143-153/
Also, octopuses: "The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds [1]. Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed." - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
Lastly, your terrestrial experience might limit your understanding of what a 'tool' might be: "tool users in water often use other animals (and their products) and water itself as a tool ... Octopodes, as well as squids and cuttlefishes, also use water as a tool for protection by using jets of water to aid in burrowing for camouflage ... Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) singly and collectively expel bubbles to create nets that encircle, contain and concentrate schooling prey for easy gulping " - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden
Intelligence is in no way the best tool to guarantee reproduction, there's absolutely no inevitability to it. Grass reproduces just fine without intelligence. There's species practically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
There is no evolutionary plan or roadmap, it's random mutations.
It’s not impossible that they did have a civilization, of sorts, and all traces have been wiped.
https://www.thoughtco.com/crows-are-more-intelligent-than-yo...
Intelligence and civilization is not the pinnacle of evolution considering all the species that lived, live and will live without developing it. It's rather an oddity in the story of life.
Complexity affords efficiency advantages, though usually with a resilience cost. Over the period in which that advantage exists, it's beneficial. A sufficient shock could (and frequently has) greatly negated the benefits of complexity.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/
A fave. Several others of similar spirit:
Occam's Razor: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Ashby's "Requisite variety" (I'm not aware of a concise or elegant formulation) is another.
"This law (of which Shannon's theorem 10 relating to the suppression of noise is a special case) says that if a certain quantity of disturbance is prevented by a regulator from reaching some essential variables, then that regulator must be capable of exerting at least that quantity of selection."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)
It's been adapted as well to a "law of requisite complexity", which effectively states that only complexity can manage complexity, or alternatively, that the complexity of a control system should correspond to the controlled system. See "Complexity and Organization–Environment Relations: Revisiting Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety" by Max Boisot and Bill McKelvey.
There's also the phenomenon of vestigal functions in biology, e.g., sightless insects, fish, and animals found in cave environments, and even of eukaryotic organisms in which mitochondria once existed (a near-universal characteristic of eukaryotic life), but have since disappeared. (Their earlier presence can be inferred by relic genetic traces.) These are cases in which a previously evolved capability no longer provides a fitness advantage, and revert, typically through a process of genetic drift.
In at least some cases, the mechanism for this appears to be that not having the capability actually affords a fitness benefit. The optical system in animals consumes a substantial fraction of neurological power, and in food-scarce environments in which sight conveys no advantage, the lack of a functioning visual system reduces overall caloric requirements. That is, there is a metabolic energy constraint on fitness and complexity. I'm not aware of a named principle that captures this.
And I've suggested a possible heuristic for distinguishing between rare, false (misinnterpreted), and faked (intentionally misleading) phenomena that seems somewhat related, though it's based on perception thresholds:
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/874e7c10d09c0139a7e5002590d8e...
Not a rhetorical question so much as a follow up. I don’t know the answer to your question.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-21673940
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.
[1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-li...
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-expressi...
"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-mumm...
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
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.
It is a clear and concise description of what the article is about.
Words can have different meanings in different contexts.
In the context of dinosaurs “perfectly preserved” means that even fine details can be discerned in the fossils. And yes fossils are rocks. Someone who knows the minimal amount about dinos will know this, and even if it’s the first time you encounter the concept the article explains it nicely.
Titles are titles. They are short and thus they can’t provide a treatrise on the sum of all human knowledge. You need common sense to parse them.
The problem is that common sense also depends on context. In this case the target audience is not paleontologists, so the headline should be adjusted.
I have seen another commenter say that the articles shared on social media often include an artist rendition. Those would definitely be clickbait.
> fossils are rocks
Not always, especially in paleontology. Any kind of preservation counts, e.g. amber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil
That meaning's become confounded with the sense of "fossilised" as in "mineralised", but the original etymology referred to anything dug from the ground, hence coal as a fossil (that is, dug-from-the-Earth) fuel, a nomenclature later passed on to petroleum and natural gas.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil
(I'd only discovered this myself recently.)
(Etymology is fun.)
It’s basically like those articles that say “scientist proves existence of higher dimensions” where everyone who tends to read scientific literature figures they mean “has solved some physics equation using 4 dimensions instead of 3” but the majority who see it only through popsci articles and groups think the scientist has found physical evidence of another universe.
Sure. It would be much better to put it as "perfectly preserved fossil" or something like that.
I understand that for people who read articles about “perfectly preserved” dinosaurs often this instantly means "fine details can be discerned in the fossils", but for the majority of people who saw the title while scrolling the news feed - this means much more.
Many social media platforms allow the picture to be included in post. This article wouldn't be clickbait on one of those. This is only a problem on platforms like HN.
Then we have a much bigger problem than the headline.
In any case, the sub-title declares it as a fossil, which is more accurate.
No, it doesn't. It means something protected from decay, or kept intact, or protected.
It's common to preserve food in vinegar, sugar or salt, often after cooking it.
It's common to preserve plant and animals for study by drying them or pickling them (e.g. alcohol/formaldehyde).
"Fossils are the preserved remains of plants and animals whose bodies were buried in sediments, such as sand and mud, under ancient seas, lakes and rivers."[0]
Or the Natural History Museum:
"A fossil is physical evidence of a prehistoric plant or animal. This may be their preserved remains or other traces, such as marks they made in the ground while they were alive."[1]
[0]: https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discovering-geology/fossils-and-geolog...
[1]: A fossil is physical evidence of a prehistoric plant or animal. This may be their preserved remains or other traces, such as marks they made in the ground while they were alive.
Found in storage. Doesn't make it clickbaity, but...
> The research team suspected they may contain unborn dinosaurs, and scraped off part of Baby Yingliang’s eggshell to uncover the embryo hidden within.
...makes me wonder about their paleontology practices.
Tyrannosaurus Rex is amongst the most iconic of all dinosaurs. All knowledge we have of them comes from 18 known specimens. Of those, only 8 are 50% or more complete. "Sue", one of the best preserved examples, discovered in 1990, is 85% complete. The "dueling dinosaur" specimen (found locked in battle with a Tricerotops) is 98% complete, the most perfect yet found, discovered in 2006.
These finds are rare, they're often very partial, they're often distorted by geological processes. For example, Sue's skill is deformed due to movement of the substrates it was entombed in, a fabricated replica correcting this distortion is used on the mounted display at the Chicago Field Museum, the original is displayed separately.
A "perfectly preserved" specimen is one that is intact, in its original arrangement, not damaged, and not distorted or scattered over the landscape (or more accurately, across the strata in which it was buried).
Some respect for the time, processes, and good fortune involved here would be appropriate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specimens_of_Tyrannosaurus
Agreed that findings this well preserved are incredibly rare and fortunate.
Point remains, though, that for a species (or possibly family) that existed on Earth for a few million years (Wikipedia gives 68--66 mya, so only 2 million years, same article you cite) ... has turned up probably fewer than 100 surviving specimens, out of an estimated total 2.5 billions which had ever existed. That's literally a one-in-amillion chance of fossilisation, preservation, and discovery, so far.
"At least 66m-year-old fossil discovered in southern China reveals posture previously unseen in dinosaurs"
Most people know what a fossil is and that it's rock (though other materials such as amber can do the same thing).
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.
So, it was preparing to hatch like a bird, unlike other dinosaur embryos found before.
Doesn't the term "avian dinosaur" in some sense mean "survived K-Pg"?
(I edited my original comment to be more precise)
“Avian” or “Avian dinosaur” just means a particular branch of dinosaur that gave rise to modern birds. As opposed to “non-avian dinosaurs”.
In phylogenetic taxonomy: (1) that's exactly what it means, and (2) that's why Aves is within Dinosauria.
EDIT: I guess they're within a clade Avialae that is nested under Dinosauria. So yes, it looks like you are right.
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.
Here's the primary literature. 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-... 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?
Do you really believe that an egg can sit in mud for 10,000 years and not degrade?
> The formation preserves dinosaur bones and eggs, and fossil plants
It sounds like we have a genuine slice of pre-history. If they had said that they had preserved an insect being eaten by a chick being eaten by a dinosaur - ie 3-in-1 - would you believe that too? At what point do you try to establish your understanding with information that aligns to your experience?
>> 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.
An egg is mainly fluid, right? From what you say, you seem to think that the fluid would a/ stay in the egg for 10,000 years and then b/ be converted to solid stone. Is this really a plausible argument?
You provide an example of how much trust there is in the purported authoritative sources, even though they are impossible to believe.
If I said to you I had a 20 year old egg, that I had preserved on my bookcase, that it still had liquid in it - you would think we a fool or a liar. But a 10,000 year old egg in mud? No problem!
Only that the fossilization is faster than total decay.
And no one agrees with you that a news article is supposed to include the full paleontological details.
> would you believe that too?
But, they aren't, so your question seems pointless.
> Is this really a plausible argument?
Like I said, you clearly don't understand fossilization.
It's a slow process. Precisely zero of the descriptions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permineralization match your characterization.
> even though they are impossible to believe
You have yet to used your skepticism to analyze your own arguments. If your understanding is wrong, then your conclusion about what is possible to belief is likely also wrong.
For example, you still haven't explained why you think any fossil rock should be uniform, with no way to distinguish between fossilized bone and its surrounding matrix.
> you would think we a fool or a liar
No. Again, use your skepticism on yourself.
My first thought is that you sealed the egg, heated it up to kill any bacteria (but below 60C, which is when the egg white starts to congeal) and then ... let it sit for 20 years. No bacteria can come in. No fluid can go out. Why couldn't there be liquid after 20 years?
My second thought is you had it in a jar of lime water, which is an old way to preserve eggs, yes, even for years. https://theoldwalshfarm.com/water-glassing-eggs/ claims still edible after 2 years, so I can believe still with liquid after 20.
So we know that eggs can last for years, with liquid inside.
Why are you so trusting in the correctness of your beliefs?
And the claim isn't even that the egg was hermetically sealed in order to be fossilized. Over time the content of the egg is replaced with groundwater, while in an environment that doesn't easily support organic decay.
Which we know exists, as we've found 2,000 year old bodies in bogs, and the rock formation the fossil was in indicates a fluvial environment.
That's right - I don't. I don't understand how an egg can remain unfossilised yet intact with liquid in for 10,000 years. You do apparently.
> claims still edible after 2 years, so I can believe still with liquid after 20.
Yes - while I used 20 to illustrate the ridiculous point you are making, you actually said greater than 10,000.
> You have yet to used your skepticism to analyze your own arguments. If your understanding is wrong, then your conclusion about what is possible to belief is likely also wrong. and > use your skepticism on yourself.
That's not how it works. I'm not making the claim that eggs can last for thousands of years, without degrading, then be converted to stone, then be found millions of years later, then be opened up (somehow!) to reveal the stone 'skeleton' inside of the creature inside. It is fine for me to be skeptical. I'm asking for evidence of these outlandish claims. I don't think there is any.
You think you do understand fossilisation etc - so much that you accept the story above. Feel free to explain it in more detail, or how and why you started to believe these sorts of claims. I'm especially interested to hear how you verified what was said.
> Why are you so trusting in the correctness of your beliefs?
I'm not trusting anything - I even think my experience can be wrong. But the argument I am making aligns with common place understanding. You would leave an egg in some mud and come back 1-2 years later to find it as you left it, right? I'm saying the same rules apply to everything - saying 'millions of years' or whatever shouldn't mean reasoning is deferred. What are you trusting?
You aren't skeptical. You're making boring internet arguments.
Merry Christmas.
I know there are 'experts' and lots of information, but I don't think all that is anything more than a talking shop. The information can be steered, be wrong, etc. Eg there are huge bodies of scriptural works, phrenology was a thing once, etc, etc - was that right just because it exists? Just because there is lots written doesn't mean I have to invest half a lifetime to get to grips with whatever is being discussed. Either it makes sense, or it doesn't.
Instead I take a simple position - if I don't have verified experience of whatever-it-is I take a closer look. I ask - what are the claims, what is the evidence. I'm not trusting that someone else has 'got this' even if they are credentialed.
Its illuminating. If nothing else, it illuminates just how little knowledge other people have on the subject, and yet they like to pretend they are an authority! And these pretenders will group together and dismiss the man but not the argument.
Anyway, if I've given you pause for thought, that's great.
Merry Christmas to you too :)
There's these things called books, there's even a thing called Wikipedia with a specific article to get you started[0]. Why are you being so vexatious?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil#Permineralization
I see the pictures of fish etc on the provided link. Again, I don't understand how this could be preserved on the surface of a rock, or on mud, etc.
In your experience, have ever seen some biological matter rest somewhere, without decaying? Have you ever dug into the ground or mud and found a bone there? The closest I come to that is when I step in mud, and a stick is underneath... but this would be frail and degraded. In all my experience biological matter is broken down very quickly.
From the linked Wikipedia page.
In many places, it is indeed impossible for fossils to form (for example, rainforests) due to various environmental factors. But in some places, fossils do in fact form, as evidenced by the fact that we have fossils.
Yes :) But you realise you are accepting what you are told to say that?
Are there any other possibilities though, to explain what we see as fossils? Is it possible that these photos are faked, or that the fossils themselves are faked? Or that they are real skeletons, but the story around them is wrong? Eg perhaps the fish was placed on the wall last year, and that is the mark it left.
I think it is clear that there are other possibilities. I think I can also make a case for them being more plausible than the story.
Regardless, we will not gain knowledge by accepting what we are told unconditionally - we should be personally verifying. Unless we have personally verified something, we cannot say "I know". We can I can say "I read" or "I believe" or "it is my hypothesis that". But it is not possible to truthfully say "I know".
> Under Last Thursdayism, books, fossils, light already on the way from distant stars, and literally everything (including your memories of the time before last Thursday) were all formed at the time of creation (last Thursday) in a state such that they appear much older.
> Last Thursdayism functions both as a philosophical point on how our observations may not match with "reality" and a reductio ad absurdum of the young-Earth creationist idea of the omphalos hypothesis: if the world was created 6,000 years ago with the appearance of being made billions of years ago, what is there to stop us from claiming it was made Last Thursday?
It's boring.
Yes, there are other possibilities - the universe could have been created Last Thursday.
> I think I can also make a case for them being more plausible than the story.
And Last Thursdayists make the case that Last Thursdayism is more plausible than the usual cosmology.
So, go ahead and do it.
> Unless we have personally verified something, we cannot say "I know".
Have you personally verified that North Dakota exists? That New Zealand exists?
If you want a discussion about solipsism, go bother some philosophers.
Just Asking Questions - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions - is a form of intellectual dishonesty.
I understand your point - but there is a real point to what I'm saying. The fact is that no one is actually checking anything. Its all based on trust.
I know. Its dull, but you need to verify information before you actively promote or parrot it. Its the scientific method, and it should be applied personally. You cannot "know" unless you verify personally. You can trust, believe, etc but not know. If you say 'I know' without having verified whatever-it-is, you are in fact (unintentionally, perhaps) lying.
> It's boring.
Another way of responding is that the truth may in fact be boring. It might not be possible to say anything meaningful about stuff, especially when that stuff relates to events that may (or may not) have happened 66 million years ago.
Just because its boring, and there is not much to know, should we accept any old story that purports to explain things? Is that reason? Is it religious/magical thinking? Would it better to say 'I don't know'?
I don't trust your statement.
I don't trust your statement because everything I've done to actually check on thing shows it to be correct.
Again, does North Dakota exist? Does New Zealand exist? Was the universe created last Thursday?
> but you need to verify information before you actively promote or parrot it.
I have verified it to my satisfaction. Just because you are not satisfied does not mean I am parroting thing.
I have never been to New Zealand. I am satisfied that it exists.
> should we accept any old story that purports to explain things?
Absolutely not. Which is why I don't accept your story that "It's all based on trust.
2. How wide do you expect the fossil-conspiracy to be? This specimen was found in China by Chinese, surely they don't care about western evolutionists?
3. Have you never ever seen or found a fossil yourself? If you use sedimentary rock as wall cover you will get a fossil sooner or later.
https://southlandstone.com/using-fossil-stone-in-the-house/
3. You could travel to Michigan and just wander the beach until you find a fossilized coral. They are easy to find:
https://www.michigan.org/article/trip-idea/where-find-petosk...
4. Or go treasure hunting other coasts. Here is a video of a guy collecting fossilized ammonites in Ireland. I link to the timestamp he is opening a rock. If this is fake how do you think it was done?
https://youtu.be/OVCH98aFSRY?t=591
And if you watch the whole video you see other fossils in the big stones themselves. To reiterate: You can visit these places! Fossils are quite common.
But, surely you know about mummies, yes? Mummification has happened accidentally, including Ötzi.
Bodies are found in peat bogs which have been there for 2,000 years, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldremose_Woman . See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bog_bodies .
And it isn't that the organic material doesn't decay, but that fossilization occurs before substantial decay. The first paragraph in the Lagerstätte page even says:
> These formations may have resulted from carcass burial in an anoxic environment with minimal bacteria, thus delaying the decomposition of both gross and fine biological features until long after a durable impression was created in the surrounding matrix.
so, no, they weren't "preserved on the surface of a rock", but buried, then fossilized.
In the fish image, the upper layer then forms its own layer of stone. In the Green River Formation, the split fish layer can "easily split along the layers to reveal the fossils" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_River_Formation
If you don't understand the topic, that's fine. But to reject a description under the guise of skepticism, without honestly engaging in the material, is not.
But have you ever heard about Piltdown Man? I was taught this as fact, when I was at school (and I'm not _that_ old): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
It is now an admitted fake. Why would they fake it?
Anyway - it seems that sometimes this research is faked. Is it possible that in 30 years some of those examples are also admitted as fakes?
(you can also look into: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars)
I actually think it is possible for a body to be buried in a bog, and perhaps be in reasonable condition after 100s of years.
Do you think an egg would last though? For 1000 years (as per another commentor), until it fossilises? And then not be assimilated into the rock that it is surrounded by? And then be found? And then be cracked open to reveal the skeleton inside?
Can I get some odds on that please!!
Would you say you can deform an egg without destroying it?
Why must all or even most fossilized eggs be deformed?
Here's 2,500 year old eggs from a tomb. https://www.archaeology.org/news/7502-190327-china-ancient-e... .
Here's 500 year old eggs from another tomb. https://en.dahe.cn/2019/12-12/567243.html
> And then be cracked open
It was not cracked open. Strawman exaggeration for effect is how rhetoric got a bad name.
> Can I get some odds on that please
Yes, it's low. Shall I pull a number out of my ass and say 1 in a trillion?
Now, can I get an estimate on the number of eggs laid in a 100 million year period?
I'll pull another number of my ass and say a population of 10 billion egg-laying creatures, living 10 years, with 10% of eggs making it to adulthood. That's 10 billion eggs per year, I think. Times 100 million years = 1 quintillion eggs that might be fossilized.
Times 1 in a trillion gives 1 million fossilized eggs.
Of which only a small fraction are found.
So your problem with the odds are ... what exactly? That you're not used to thinking about rare events across geologic time?
It’s fine to be skeptical and ask questions, but you’re asking a bunch of questions that palaeontologists have figured out years ago. I suggest you take some time to understand the details if you’re truly interested.
I suspect you may be coming from a place of mistrust in science? It’s not a good position to be in as you’re missing out on a lot of the world if you can’t enjoy this kind of thing.
here's the study source, with beautiful high res version of the pictures https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(21)01487-5
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!
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-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-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.
To the point that that's the etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/simile
This gives a strange feeling about having ... a dinosaur on a Thanksgiving table. Well, could be a table topic at least.