[HN Gopher] 110M year-old nodosaur is the best-preserved fossil ...
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110M year-old nodosaur is the best-preserved fossil of its kind
(2017)
Author : djsumdog
Score : 182 points
Date : 2020-05-22 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nationalgeographic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nationalgeographic.com)
| SeanFerree wrote:
| Very cool!!
| danans wrote:
| > it was an enormous four-legged herbivore protected by a spiky,
| plated armor. It weighed approximately 3,000 pounds.
|
| > To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it
| still weighs 2,500 pounds!
|
| How does it weight less as a stone fossil than as an organic life
| form mostly made of water?
|
| Most stone is 2-3 times as dense as water
|
| https://www.thoughtco.com/densities-of-common-rocks-and-mine...
| skykooler wrote:
| Because it wasn't fossilized; it's mostly original material.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| Sadly I don't believe that's possible. It would be beyond
| fantastic if it were.
| [deleted]
| danans wrote:
| Wow, that's wild, almost like Black Swan wild. I was so
| predisposed to assume fossils are solid stone that I missed
| that. Still, living things are mostly water, and I doubt the
| mummified 2500 pounds is mostly water. Another response to my
| question suggests that just the outer shell is stone in the
| inside is empty. In that case, the mass is coming from the
| stone shell, and is not very analogous to the living animal's
| mass, which still makes the phrasing in the article a bit
| dubious.
|
| Perhaps though it contains some original carbon that can be
| used to do some very old radiocarbon dating, which could
| improve geological strata based dating of other fossil finds.
| catalogia wrote:
| As far as I can gather, that's not true and the soft tissue
| was in fact mineralized. Dinosaur "mummies" are fossils of
| mummies. This dinosaur 'mummy' is fairly unique insofar the
| soft tissue was mineralized without first being desiccated.
|
| Chemical traces of things like pigmentation can remain in
| fossilized soft tissue, I suppose that counts as "original
| material", but this thing isn't made out of meat anymore.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > How does it weight less as a stone fossil than as an organic
| life form mostly made of water?
|
| > Most stone is 2-3 times as dense as water
|
| Presumably because the water was completely filling a volume,
| whereas the stone is very much not.
| smcameron wrote:
| Only half of it is there. The back half of the thing is gone.
| SmallPeePeeMan wrote:
| > To give you an idea of how intact the mummified nodosaur is: it
| still weighs 2,500 pounds!
|
| Why is that relevant? Tissue has been replaced by minerals which
| presumably are much denser than flesh.
| smashah wrote:
| Umm don't you mean denosaur??
| dmix wrote:
| Previously, with better pictures:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913 (2017; 117
| comments)
| dang wrote:
| Plus with comments from the author of the article.
|
| Ok, we'll change from https://www.earthlymission.com/dinosaur-
| mummy-science-discov... to https://www.nationalgeographic.com/m
| agazine/2017/06/dinosaur.... Thanks!
| cheerlessbog wrote:
| The NG article is pay walled.
| dang wrote:
| If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post
| workarounds in the thread. There's at least one in this
| thread.
|
| This is in the FAQ at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more
| explanation here:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&q
| u...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
| dorkwood wrote:
| Always a red flag when an article doesn't put a date of
| publication anywhere on the page.
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20171223121530/http://www.nation...
| wincy wrote:
| Wow this is amazing! So exciting to see stuff like this.
| dopylitty wrote:
| It looks like an ancestor of the denosaur, which seems to be a
| much more advanced/evolved take on the same general design.
| [deleted]
| runjake wrote:
| This article appears to be from 2017. There isn't any new
| information on the nodosaur specimen.
| alecb wrote:
| Yah, it's also a clumsy plagiarization of our article:
| https://allthatsinteresting.com/nodosaur-dinosaur-mummy
|
| It looks like their site is another on the list that lifts our
| articles and recirculates them on social media.
| eloff wrote:
| @dang can we change the link to this one to give credit to
| the source? And add 2017 tag.
| gus_massa wrote:
| You will get a faster response if you send an email to
| hn@ycombinator.com They usually respond very fast.
| dang wrote:
| We've changed from https://www.earthlymission.com/dinosaur-
| mummy-science-discov... to the original source.
| tthayer wrote:
| Which is itself a summary of the original NG article? https:/
| /www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur...
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Yours is just a regurgitation of the National Geographic
| feature, so I'm not sure what legs you have to stand on here.
| Ironic.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I wonder if they recovered any vegetation samples from its
| digestive system
| tpmx wrote:
| Why did this Canadian energy company (Suncor) react to this
| properly? Theories? Surely there'd be immense economic pressure
| to just keep digging.
|
| (Am I being too cynical?)
| giarc wrote:
| Suncor was right in the midst of a big investigation into 500
| ducks that died in a tailings pond. Might have played a role.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/syncrude-suncor-clear...
| [deleted]
| tpmx wrote:
| That sounds like a plausible reason. Timeline checks out.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Now think of all the fossils and historical artifacts we're not
| hearing about because they just kept digging.
| ozborn wrote:
| There's a number of reasons I think, including: 1. The fossil
| itself is beautiful and outstanding
|
| 2. There is less pressure to produce right now given oversupply
| and shipping constraints in Alberta
|
| 3.Suncor cares more about its reputation than some of the other
| players in the tar sands
|
| 4. The Royal Tyrell Museum is well known to most Albertans,
| kids go there on school trips and it would likely seem like the
| obvious thing to do (stop work) when presented with such a
| find.
|
| 5. I have no idea if there is a finders fee, but that fossil is
| probably more valuable than anything that loader was processing
| all day.
|
| 6. It's a dinosaur - most folks find them pretty cool. :)
| agilebyte wrote:
| Re 5) I don't think they knew how valuable it was when
| uncovering it, the region is filled with fossils. When I
| visited Royal Tyrrell Museum in 2016 they said they have more
| fossils in the storage than they have time to process them.
| tpmx wrote:
| 2) It happened in 2011. The oil price was around $100/barrel
| back then. Was there a regional oversupply back then?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Obligatory question: DNA?
| ericlewis wrote:
| DNA half-life basically wouldn't be able to survive this long,
| no matter how well preserved I believe.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| That is my understanding too. Also they mention mineral
| deposits so it seems like this is still at least somewhat a
| fossil?
| epicureanideal wrote:
| Even if DNA itself can't, it seems possible that with
| advanced enough technology there might be hope of recovery of
| something other than DNA that could be used to figure out
| what the DNA was.
|
| Imagine for example a machine that takes off 1 layer of atoms
| at a time, painstakingly charting them, and then another
| layer of software that figures out probabilistically whether
| the arrangement of atoms means that a decayed strand of DNA
| was here... and then probabilistically adds together the the
| billions of decayed shreds of DNA.
|
| Maybe the relative positions of the base pairs are still
| probabilistically informative despite decaying and many of
| them breaking apart. I don't know. But it seems like there's
| a plausible way to try to extract data from fossilized DNA.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| With advanced enough technology, we might train an ML model
| to generate a genome that morphologically approximates the
| dinosaur, simulating the trillions of protein foldings and
| chemical interactions involved in each trial, until we have
| a genome that produces the dinosaur, physically.
|
| Because we have no certain model of the dinosaur,
| behaviorally, we can guess at that and ML our way to that,
| too.
|
| And boom: you have your ersatz sim dino, and it only took
| like three Matrioshka brains.
| nemo wrote:
| The half-life of DNA is ~521 years at 13.1degC. This dino
| is more than 100 million years old.
|
| Scientists have been working very diligently to try to
| recover DNA from millions of years ago, but the reality is
| any DNA found has a very good chance of being from bacteria
| & other organisms from the more recent past.
|
| Still there are (disputed) claims to have found DNA that's
| millions of years old:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/possible-
| dinosaur...
| credit_guy wrote:
| Not clear to me how this meme that the half-life of DNA
| of about 500 years appeared. There is no concept of half-
| life for chemicals, there's one only for radioisotopes.
|
| For this particular mummified dinosaur, if they found
| lots of somewhat preserved soft tissue, maybe hundreds of
| pounds, chances are that there could be trillions of DNA
| segments. Very likely no single gene will be unbroken,
| but with many fragments broken in different places the
| theoretical possibility to reconstitute the genetic code
| is there. You also don't start from zero knowledge.
| Humans and birds share about 65% of the genetic code [1],
| and dinosaurs are closer to birds than humans are.
|
| [1] https://education.seattlepi.com/animals-share-human-
| dna-sequ...
| nemo wrote:
| When you're looking at things this old the reality is any
| DNA found has a very good chance of being from bacteria &
| other organisms/contamination from the more recent than
| 100 million years ago past. Even if you come up with a
| really clever tool to find ancient DNA you have no
| guarantees of finding dino DNA nor any way to filter out
| the DNA from all the organisms of the past, virtually all
| unsequenced, that could be contaminants.
| nemo wrote:
| While this thing is being referred to as "mummified" the
| fossil itself is a result of gradual processes that
| replaced the original form of the corpse with minerals.
| It's not dried meat in there. The find was a few years
| ago, so much has been written on the topic, and you
| should read what the discussions of experts on the topic
| had to say.
|
| I'm not sure if you read this link before but I encourage
| you to - it includes a nice summary of the issues.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/possible-
| dinosaur...
| rolph wrote:
| >There is no concept of half-life for chemicals<
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-
| dentistry/...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_half-life
|
| half life is a general term that is frequently used in
| biochemistry, enzyme kinetics, chemistry and nuclear
| physics
|
| as a general term it is converse of doubling time and is
| simply a measure of stability or observed activity
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life
| credit_guy wrote:
| Ok, there's a concept of biological half-life, including
| the famous 5 hours for caffeine. Living bodies are
| extraordinarily similar though, for example we all have
| about the same temperature of 36 deg Celsius. Chemicals
| out in the open, that's a completely different story.
|
| To be more specific: [1] is a published article in
| Current Biology where they state they were able to fully
| sequence the genome of two mammoths, one of which was
| 44.8k years old. That would be 86 half-lives according to
| the meme of 521y half-life for DNA. 2^(-86) is roughly
| 10^(-26). By the logic of DNA half-life, reconstituting a
| 44.8k y.o. mammoth genome would be beyond utterly
| ridiculous. Still, here we are.
|
| [1] https://www.cell.com/current-
| biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)...
| nemo wrote:
| When I first said the half-life of DNA is ~521 years at
| 13.1degC I was careful to include that temperature which
| made it clear that the decay of any organic material over
| time has more variables than merely time. Here's the
| article where that number comes from.
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.
| 201...
|
| Mammoth DNA preserved in permafrost can last longer.
| Temperature is a variable. But dinosaurs lived in a very
| warm time, much warmer than the Ice Age the mammoths
| lived in so there's no possibility of nature somehow
| preserving Jurassic fossils in ice/permafrost.
| teraflop wrote:
| Not likely. According to the research I've seen, the half-life
| of DNA nucleotide bonds in fossilized samples is on the order
| of a few hundred thousand years. But that's the half-life of
| _each_ bond, which means sequences of non-trivial length will
| become fragmented much more quickly. After 110 million years,
| it seems very unlikely that anything sequenceable still exists,
| even in trace amounts.
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Could someone knowledgeable in pchem explain how this works?
| I'm guessing that half of the substance doesn't
| deterministically decay after a specific amount of time. I
| imagine that the decay follows some probability distribution,
| which should mean some portion of the substance decays much
| faster or slower, right? Does some of it never decay at all?
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| See link to previous discussion, posted above
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913
|
| Might help.
| starpilot wrote:
| DNA doesn't have a "half-life," there's no consistent inverse
| exponential decay that continues in perpetuity. It's like
| saying what's the half-life of a steak? Degradation depends
| on conditions.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| But if they're fossilized, those broken bonds would still be
| roughly in the same locations, right? So not useful for
| sequencing, but maybe the information can still be recovered
| by some future not-yet-possible means.
| jbay808 wrote:
| An interesting question might be, assuming this animal has some
| descendants alive today, has its original gene sequence been
| better preserved in that heritage than within its own body?
| octocop wrote:
| 110 million years old feels like a shoot from the hip. How do
| they estimate the age of something like this?
| osamagirl69 wrote:
| Usually using radiometric dating. Carbon-14 has too short of a
| halflife (~5000 years) to be useful for fossils, but
| potassium-40 has a long enough halflife (~1.2 billion years)
| that it can be used to date minerals going back to the
| formation of the earths crust--it has even been used to
| estimate when the moon was formed (4-5 billion years ago)!
| close04 wrote:
| Radiometric dating is also used on the layers around the
| fossil. In this case of the hydrocarbon deposit [0].
|
| [0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293
| cknoxrun wrote:
| I've seen this in person, and almost every year I visit the
| museum and have the same reaction. I stand there in wonder
| looking at it for about 30 minutes. The connection to the past
| world feels absolutely visceral. You can get very close to it,
| and it is never too busy around the museum as it is so large. If
| you ever get a chance to visit this part of Canada (Drumheller),
| and particularly this museum, you should go for it.
| igrekel wrote:
| I second this! I visited the Tyrrel museum in Drumheller and
| the Dinosaur provincial park that's near Patricia as a young
| adult about 20 years ago and it is still imprinted in my
| memory.
|
| I had seen dinosaur skeletons in museums before but it didn't
| compare. Also guided tours through the limited access of the
| park were amazing, almost surreal, with fossils of dinosaur
| bones just popping out of the ground now and then plus the
| chance of seeing active digs.
| FriendlyNormie wrote:
| Paywall. Fuck off.
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