A Dinosaur So Well Preserved It Looks Like a Statue | Hacker News Reader

A Dinosaur So Well Preserved It Looks Like a Statue

theatlantic.com

310 pointsbrisance27 comments

> Those hands belonged to technician Mark Mitchell, who compares the process of separating dinosaur from rock to chipping concrete chunks from a surface as soft as compressed talcum powder. It took him 7,000 hours over 5.5 years, during which he did little else. For that reason, the dinosaur carries his name—Borealopelta markmitchelli. (The first half comes from the Latin for “northern shield.”)

So basically, preparing a fossil is rather like sculpting a statue. The outline is there, but following it isn't so trivial.

This was the most remarkable part about the whole thing as well. 7,000 hours just working on a single fossil. This man must have extraordinary patience

Still 30%-ish away from being an expert! On a serious note, compare that rhythm with our field...

lol, this probably wasn't his first work.

it's a type of work where one can call herself an expert after just two projects... just like web development ;)

3 month bootcamps make us "experts". Ha!

Actually kudos to the mine workers and mine management for halting operations and letting archaeologists access the site.

The cost involved here is enormous with this, so such an operations often decide to ignore the bones instead.

I've met some folks involved in quarrying and have heard stories about seeing fossils and blowing them up to avoid stopping work. It's terribly sad and should have large consequences.

I'm really glad this mine did it the right way and stopped!

Consequences, yes. But surely it would help to have appropriate positive incentives toward doing the right thing, for example mandated insurance for an archeological event, that pays out in the event that one occurs.

Always better to set up a win-win than to try to create fear over getting caught.

Cool blog post about how NatGeo's 3D tour of the fossil was created using Three.js in the browser.

https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon/

Original post from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913

I wonder if they'll get a good image of the dinosaur's insides! What could they use to see through the rock?

I wish in the headlining photo a person was standing next to the fossil to give a sense of scale. That thing is probably > 10 feet long! No wonder it took 7000 hours to separate from the rock.

There are images with a 10cm scale bar here: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)3...

The hi res image: http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2102978684/2080439624/gr1...

Had it before but a different article and photo. Showed this to my daughter who is dino-crazy a few months ago - she went '>gasp< WOW!' genuine agape awe. Amazing. Isn't it fantastic that the operator was trained and cared enough to stop working? It would have been really cool though if prior to expetrification that the block was MRI'ed and a 3D model created from the MRI which could then be 3D printed in schools all over the world.

Note: birds are technically dinosaurs

http://tolweb.org/Dinosauria/14883

And dinosaurs are reptiles, mammals and reptiles are amniotes [1], both amniotes and amphibians are tetrapods, tetrapods are actually fish[2], and there's no such thing as a fish[3]!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapodomorpha

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_Thing_as_a_Fish

So we have more in common with all land animals than a fish has with any other fish?

No, plenty of fish are closely related. There is however a lot more diversity so the extreme cases are far more extreme.

I've read that we have more in common with fungi than plants.

I vaguely remebering reading (I think it was in The Selfish Gene) that we are more closely related to salmon than salmon are to sharks.

This is absolutely true, and to be expected from the fact that the inheritance splits like a tree. For one thing both we and salmon have bones, sharks only have cartilage.

But we're more closely related to sharks than either is to the jawless fishes like the hagfish. The hagfish are just plain weird.

Is it that surprising? The land is populated only by the descendants of a few species that moved into it.

Humans (and all tetrapods) are more closely related to lungfish and coelacanths than either of those two types of fish are to other living fish.

Original discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913

>So paleontologists have debated whether giant dinosaurs had trunks

That's my biggest takeaway from the article

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