First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found has finally been studied in detail | Hacker News Reader

First complete dinosaur skeleton ever found has finally been studied in detail

phys.org

113 pointswoldemariam39 comments

The paper has some nice illustrations in case anyone is interested in reading about it in more detail: https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa06...

I wonder why they're using illustrations instead of 3D models.

They probably had an illustrator already availabile and didn't want to make an unrealistic secondary model while fighting the modeling/rendering toolchain to do so.

Not everybody's got a high res 3D scanner laying around

/me looks at the front facing camera and tof sensor on his phone and sighs...

Technology, meet business goals :(.

Drawings can better show what the bones look like than photographs (https://thenode.biologists.com/illustrators-see-camera-cant/...)

I would think that is true for “drawing vs 3D model”, too, but of course, 3D models could be used to check the interpretation by the illustrator.

Whoa, that map on page 2 reminds me of some 1990s tabletop RPGs. Right down to the naming style.

That paper is a beautiful thing: 86 pages full of hand stippled line drawings.

Used to many 2 pager papers, at 86 pages this paper feels more like a book than a paper.

Can someone recommend (non-fiction) books about dinosaurs that are scientifically accurate and aimed at a college educated but non-expert audience?

Not a book, but I enjoyed this talk from The Royal Institute:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f-jD7kQvyPs

That was a good talk! The speaker (David Hone) plugs his book at the end “The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs”

Thanks!

I remember being in that very room and attending some talks a few years ago. Good times.

"The Rise & Fall of the Dinosaurs" by Steve Brusatte is a great book that describes chronologically the beginning of dinosaurs through their end - by means of a young scientist telling about his various digs in his own (non-chronologically) experience. One thing I found important and unique about it was that it put the dinosaurs in the context of their geological environment.

It's relatively up to date, easily accessible, teaches quite a bit, and is fun.

Birds are dinosaurs...

I just finished reading the first couple of volumes of Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe and have learned a lot about dinosaurs from that.

Not a book, but there is also the excellent “PBS Eons” series on YouTube that has a lot of videos on dinosaurs.

You're in luck. We have 2 such books today. Other than "Rise & Fall of Dinosaurs" mentioned, "Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology" is a good one too.

I wonder: since we have skeletons of living species, and the living animals themselves, couldn't we theoretically train a model to go from bones to pictures of the animal (or 3D models or whatever), and then apply it to dinosaur skeletons to see what comes up? Is there any way that could end up getting us somewhat realistic depictions?

Honest question - what has stopped us from bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life? Which variable in the equation is unsolved?

DNA. There's no recoverable DNA to be discovered after that long, pretty much regardless of how it might have been preserved.

For one, we don't have their DNA.

See eg https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosa...

On top of what the article says, even if we had pristine dinosaur DNA, the way we clone things is through a living host - so whatever we'd clone would be half-dinosaur, half-cow, or half-whatever animal volunteered a womb/egg.

I get what you're saying but it would more likely be half-Dino, half-chicken :-)

As an aside though, wasn't there a place to reintroduce wooly mammoths? Wonder what happened to that.

Not necessarily half. There'd definitely be some sharing but when we clone things we replace the genome in the egg that's used. That said it'll share mitochondrial and other things during development

Frogs my bro

The youngest dinosaur fossil found is estimated to be 65 million years old.

The oldest DNA sample is estimated to be 800,000 years old.

So we simply don't have DNA from a dinosaur.

On this topic, I really enjoy talks from Jack Horner.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fr...

Wait, this is the first complete dinosaur skeleton ever found?! What have I been looking at in museums?

Possibly the first+N complete skeleton ever found. The first was over 160 years ago.

Hey, that's all well and good; but can someone get some web development work for Alexandra? This her bio/profile:

https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra

The waving gif link in the sci hub page posted by another commenter is excellent.

Heh, that gif is like the most human touch I've seen on a website in ages. Great stuff. :)

Which gif, and where?

https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaa06...

I’m super confused. I don’t see any gifs or links to gifs on any of the pages of that PDF.

It doesn't show up on mobile. Try requesting desktop site if you're on mobile.

LMFAO that's cool

If you click the gif it redirects to a page where there's a bigger version, where if you that gif it becomes a video and she talks a bit.

EDIT: The page it redirects to, https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra

Honestly, that end section with illustrations and links (I presume to her blog posts) is some of the prettiest web desin I've seen. Glad to see the creator of Sci-Hub is so skilled, her service has helped me out many times.

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