Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016)

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110 pointstriplesec39 comments

It's been a sad couple of years for people who grew up with Jurassic Park and now realize those scary beasts are just a bunch of mutant chickens.

Just wait until they realize that these were not warm blooded animals and thus the large ones, including T-Rex, would have moved slower than large African animals (probably a lot slower), the fastest of which are about half as fast as normal human running speeds. for the same reason, our stamina should also be vastly superior to dinosaurs. If we just simply keep walking after running away, dinosaurs will never catch up.

Even the smaller ones would only be able to maintain their top speeds for very short durations. Double digit seconds at the very most, and one can be fairly sure not more than 20/30 kph.

Humans, and in fact nearly every animal, should be able to easily outrun and outlast any dinosaur. Probably the same as crocodiles, where being a lot faster and having more stamina does little good once those jaws close, or if you can't tell where the animal is reliably (like underwater). So they should be a lot like crocodiles : a human can pester them (on land) and be nearly perfectly certain that (s)he's never going to get caught by the animal (which is practiced in North Australia to get the things out of your bedroom).

Central bearded dragon's are ~1lb reptiles and can do 25MPH which is faster than most people.

So, at least predator dinosaurs where likely faster than most people. We might do fine over long distances, but overall we are fairly slow.

As to being warm blooded, that's less meaningful for very large creatures. Body feathers are also a sign something is trying to conserve body heat which is a sign it's warm blooded.

Trained humans can maintain a speed of ~20kph for hours (as in plural). Peak speed for a few seconds (which is what would be required to escape these animals if reaction time is not the problem) is ~50 kph for humans (but only for 10 meters or so).

Apples to apples, humans are far superior to these speeds. The best animals for these measurements do crush these figures (by a factor of ~3), but I would expect that the best dinosaurs wouldn't.

> Very large animals are effectively warm blooded by default due to volume to surface ratios cooling is a much larger problem than staying warm.

True, but being "very large" does not really help with either top speed or explosive power. The fastest animals are small (though not tiny, a decent-not-huge dog in size but much lighter) brittle little things. They chase, rapidly inflict a mortal wound, and run away, waiting until it is abandoned to eat. Fast animals, from cheetahs to rabbits are much lighter than their appearance would suggest. The animals with greatest endurance are larger, but humans are, perhaps surprisingly, pretty good at endurance. Clearly we, at one point, hunted like dogs do : not by outsprinting an animal in an intense fast chase, but by wearing it down for hours, slowly closing in for the kill. Most animals should not be able to escape humans using that strategy. Human hunters would make an animal sprint for it's life 10 times, letting it "escape" 9 times.

The drastic difference between 12mph and 25mph is where our problems would show up. Many predators can do 20+ mph for long enough to eat us. Polar Bear's top out at around 25MPH but they can sustain that long enough that the safe distance is around 1/2 mile. Brown Bear's are worse making running a bad idea.

Endurance hunting is far more effective in very high temperatures so it's use as likely limited.

Humans are group animals. Try and stalk an individual wolf in a pack as an individual (even with a rifle) and let me know how it goes. You'd be lucky to live and tell the tale. Humans are the same. Getting the better of an individual human ... so easy it's hardly worth mentioning. Same with the wolf. Doing the same in a group of 100 humans, even a single individual in that group ? You won't survive the attempt.

In all animals strategies work together to establish a desired outcome. Human strength does not come from intelligence, intelligence is simply what allows us to coordinate in large groups. The actual strength comes from the large groups.

Reminded me of a video that depicts thousands of African tribesman and their dogs on a mass hunt. It's awful to watch but it gives you an idea of how our ancestors hunted thousands and tens of thousands of years ago.

Again, it's heart wrenching to watch them take down elephants and the like, but if you're still interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipn5rSQ2PY4

> Trained humans can maintain a speed of ~20kph for hours

The very best humans can only manage ~20kph for 2.05 hours (WR: 42.2km in 2:02:57 giving 20.59kph). Beyond that, the 50km WR is down to 18.3kph; 100km WR is 16.1kph; etc.

That's for modern humans. Bone density studies of humans ~10,000 years ago suggest our muscles were much stronger.

Endurance runners are not generally strong. Upper body strength for example is counter productive.

Further, Olympic paces are maintained by people getting aided with sports drinks at regular intervals etc. It's very different from the conditions primitive people would have lived.

I recall reading a paper where they inferred the dinosaur body temperature from Ca isotope ratio in a tooth. Came closer to warm blooded than cold blooded. Interesting research too.

Here is the link:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/06/22/scien...

Very interesting. This would only apply to the largest of dinosaurs though, wouldn't it ? The kind that's just not ever going to chase anything.

quite possibly, although the effect might still be there. extant bumblebees warm themselves up after crawling outside on the cold morning by buzzing their wings.

Although true, it really is a matter of perspective. If you were June bug, or any bug, running into a chicken would be a frightful and terrifying prospect.

The "six foot turkey" kid was right all along..

Reversing back the clock on evolution feels counter productive.

As is getting dentures, but it's more fun turning back the clock that way than not getting dentures (if those teeth are gone.) I vote for fun and discovery. And corn on the cob.

I wonder if we'll eventually find that all, or most, dinosaurs were feathered. I mean, it is a bit of a coincidence, that we find a dinosaur tail in amber and it just so happens to be from a feather dinosaur- it's a bit of a coincidence.

Have other dinosaur body parts been found so well preserved?

feathers are more likely to get stuck in resin?

I think the defining characteristic of a dinosaur that would allow it to be trapped in resin is small size. I couldn't imagine a T-Rex getting trapped in resin, say :)

I think current think is that most therapods had at least some feathers [1]. Not sure about the dinosaurs that walked on all fours though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theropoda#Skin,_scales_and_fea...

the nodosaur found in Alberta doesnt seem to have had feathers.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-dinosaur-fossil-has-been-...

Neither does a tortoise. It doesn't seem like growing armor is conducive to producing feathers on top of it.

And as you likely know, these are dinosaur contemporaries who are from that general lineage. So great example.

"The earliest fossils are from the beginning of the age of dinosaurs, in the late Triassic."

Assuming that birds are a group of therapod dinosaurs, as many scientists now describe them, it is true that all extant dinosaurs are feathered.

But it is exciting to see these fossils discovered, so perhaps they should be described as extinct therapod feathers.

> Assuming that birds are a group of therapod dinosaurs, as many scientists now describe them...

And mammals are synapsids, apparently[1], though that's not so much of an attention-grabber.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid#Relationships

Is this the first discovery of color for dinosaurs?

If you do a search, you'll get a number of links (the farthest back I found was 2010) on feather color. I found one popsci article that describes how it was determined:

https://www.popsci.com/discover-color-dinosaur

This makes one wonder what else might be found in these markets where this was found. This could have been so easily lost to science if the right person hadn't come along at the right time. If not done already, I assume more scientist types will start trolling the markets there.

Consequences be damned, if I could make Jurassic Park, I would.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." :D

If we are able to get any DNA out amber that would be amazing. From what I understand DNA is not stable for that long. If we are able to get any DNA it would probably be inferred some microscopic structures or something left behind from the DNA. However, even then I doubt it would be complete. So why it would be amazing it would just be tiny fragments of DNA. I doubt we will even get a tiny fragment. So highly doubt we will ever get enough genetic information to be able resurrect a dinosaur. Even if we would could fill in the blanks with bird DNA.

So even if you wanted to I don't think you could. However, a mammoth for instance might be possible to clone.

DNA has a half-life. If you find 100gr of "intact" cells, it's not going to be a problem to extract the DNA.

Isn't that why they used frogs DNA? To finish incomplete sequences as a heuristic?

Also: life uh... uh finds a way.

If you imagine finding some big stash of amber with, say, 1 million different dinosaur fragments preserved, you could imagine using some statistical techniques combined with knowledge of extant related species to put something together.

yea and from my understanding it's only ~500 years or so. So a 160 million years is how old the article says that amber is. So that means what ever amount of dna would have been gone through it's half life over 300,000 times. Just thinking about that makes me absolutely certain that we would not even find an intact base-pair, and a single base pair is not even useful for cloning.

It's not happening unless there is some natural mechanism that increase that half life of DNA quite a bit, and is stable for millions of years. Otherwise we would need the DNA to leave some byproduct that we can detect.

Just make veggiesaurs.

> "We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained.

For non-experts (like me) I think it comes as a surprise to learn just how rudimentary these people's techniques are.

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