Tick Wrapped in Spider Silk Found Trapped in Amber | Hacker News Reader

Tick Wrapped in Spider Silk Found Trapped in Amber

news.nationalgeographic.com

61 pointssohkamyung24 comments

Funny. Dinosaurs evolved into birds and alligators but the tick is still a tick??

The split among archosaurs between what would go on to become crocodilians and what would go on to become birds happened a long time before there were dinosaurs. Yes, crocodilians are the closest living non-bird relatives of birds, but they're not all that close as these things go.

Yep. And the shark is still a shark, and the horseshoe crab is still a horseshoe crab...

I'd be interested in how true that is. All we really know is that there are strong morphological similarities between modern and ancient horseshoe crabs, to the extent that can be evidenced by the fossil record.

But there are many contemporaneous species that seem similar in form but have very stark differences in e.g. behavior.

Unfortunately DNA AFAIK degrades beyond recovery on geologically short timescales, so we might not ever be able to say anything definitive.

Yep. Humans supposedly envolved from monkeys sharing 99% of DNA; yet as of today monkeys still give birth to monkeys, not humans.

First of all it's apes we are closely related to not monkeys. That's a different branch.

Secondly, we are not said to have evolved "from" apes. We share a common ancestor with modern apes. That ancestor may superficially look more like othet modern apes than a modern human but only the DNA tells the true story of which is more like which and the import of that is even debatable. Even taking that resemblance for granted, there is no reason it had to be such. After speciation divided us from our last obviously ape ancestor, it was altogether likely one of us would diverge faster. It happened to be us.

You are confusing tree branches (1-monkeys, 2-humans) with tree trunks (DNA). Looking at a tree, you'll notice that the branches are never the same and yet they all come from the same trunk. Branches can fork, split, or twig, but branches don't beget other branches, trunks do. The connection between monkeys and humans is through the tree trunk, the ancestral DNA.

Why would a monkey give birth to a human?

They wouldn't give birth to a human. Just another monkey with a mutation that may (or may not) give it an advantage to survive long enough to reproduce. Over several hundred generations you can get a very different animal.

A good example is dogs. Humans controlled their breeding to promote certain attributes. Resulting in new types of animals that never existed in the wild.

I wonder what would evolve more in a given space of time...

A creature that has tens of thousands of offspring every year?

Or, a creature that has -- at most -- a few dozen offspring over a lifespan of several decades?

The answer is as obvious as it is unacceptable.

Spider is still a spider. Fascinating to think that web was created by a spiders body (an amazing process) and lasted so long. How short and fleeting a day is.

All you are saying is that it is funny that dinosaurs went extinct. Nothing says that an animal with an efficient environmental fit needs to evolve. The evolution in the arachnid family looks just about as crazy as dinosaurs to birds and alligators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnid#/media/File:Haeckel_A...

I agree with your larger point, but that image isn’t very convincing. All of those arachnids look very similar.

I can only imagine someone thinking those all look similar if they had subconsciously blanched at the batshit biodiversity on display and simply lumped them all in the "batshit" category. "Yep, all batshit, no real differences there." Look at the variation in abdominal shape and compare to, say, the variation in overall mammal body plans. I think if you look closer you'll find it stacks up pretty well.

Does it stack up well between dinosaurs and birds though? I mean, I’m nothing close to a zoologist, but even just the size difference among extant birds would strike me as more various than the arachnids in that picture, and that’s without even including dinosaurs.

The largest extant spider (the Goliath birdeater) is well over 300 times the size of the smallest (contested, but take the Patu digua as a reference) as an adult. With the bee hummingbird at about 2 and a quarter inches (~57mm), that would mean the biggest bird would need to be over 60 feet (18.2m) beak-to-tail by your reckoning. And we know of pre-spider critters (more like modern camel spiders than modern true spiders) that were house cat sized, and eurypterids preceding them that were around 8 feet long. And keep in mind that there are constraints on land-dwelling arthropods both to do with support (what do you do when you moult at that size?) and respiration that animals with skeletons, lungs and pneumatic bones don't have to deal with. What's almost funny, given things like pygmy leaf chameleons and fingernail-sized frogs, is that modern birds don't get much smaller than they do.

It all comes down to some combination of ignorance (and it's hard to know everything even in your own field, so no need for anyone to get superior or defensive where that's concerned at all) and incredulity. A lot of it is hard to imagine until you take the information that is available and spend some time actually imagining it.

Haeckel wasn't that into rendering his little ensembles to scale, AFAIK. The ones in the corners look like mites, which would mean that picture represents at least two or three orders of magnitude in size variation. But really, the scalar variable of size seems more significant than all the spikes and hairs and scales and whatnot?

all I care about is if we are getting Jurrasic park or not?

No chance. DNA has a half life of ~521 years [1] and any sample older than a few million years old will be too degraded to extract meaningful information.

https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.1...

nah, just throw some ML inference and pray that most of their DNA was unused or secondary :p

No, the article clearly explains why that won't work. DNA is not a long-term stable molecule. After millions of years the source material will be damaged beyond repair. Machine learning is not some magic band aid that solves impossible problems.

Good

Can you give evidence for this assertion? I feel like it could contain some type of supervirus which may wipe out the human race. I feel like Zombie overthrow would be bad.

Just on principle I like to see a tick that died badly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com