3000-pound triceratops skull excavated in South Dakota (2020) | Hacker News Reader

3000-pound triceratops skull excavated in South Dakota (2020)

usatoday.com

143 pointsSquibblesRedux39 comments

I was hoping for full pics of the dino but got a picture of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II

Yeah, I was annoyed at the same thing. 14 pictures in Ads, but only 1 crappy picture of the subject of the article.

Also... No course credit? Robbery!

The odds of there being a photo in these kind of articles seems exactly inversely proportional to how cool the subject is.

A Google Image search for "triceratops Grand River National Grassland" turned up a bunch of images.

Close enough.

A fossil's a fossil.

The article on the college's website has a few pictures: https://news.wcmo.edu/campus-life/westminster-college-underg...

This is a better link.

I wonder what the bones weighed prior to being fossilized. Also wondering if this is a 'typical' specimen or not.

That said, the college having a program to collect fossils for undergrads to work on really rocks. (no pun intended) There really isn't anything that can replace hands on experience for these kinds of things.

Agreed, seeing those pics of the kids standing next to the fossil warmed my heart. We need more hands on science.

One thing I always thought would be cool would be to take say the 100 most famous experiments -- from Galileo rolling balls down an incline to Hertz measuring the strength of an electromagnetic fields based on the number of footsteps from the center, and do them in an afterschool program or homeschool program. Lots of kids would enroll, and it would be quite a bit of fun.

FYI, Amazon is selling the connections DVD series for 20 bucks now -- Burke covers a lot of the great experiments. https://www.amazon.com/Connections-The-Complete-Series-DVD/d...

The ship or the woman?

I wonder why the editor chose 3k-pound instead of 1.5 ton, or 3,000 lb. Never seen that before.

Edit: OP changed the title, though the original title was within the HN character limit.

My guess is # of headline chars is a precious commodity and pounds are a more common unit if weight than tons?

> pounds are a more common unit if weight than tons?

Are they though?

There's two thousand of them for every ton, so yes! :-)

That's... pretty good. Cannot even object.

I did a quick google trends comparison and pound certainly has a lot more references than ton. Another way would be to use a text corpora...

Perhaps because there is a metric ton and a US ton.

I dunno if USA today worries about that tbh

although given the context the units should be specified in stones...

To woo women: https://liturgicalcredo.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/robin-wi...

The editor chose "3,000-pound." Whoever submitted this to HN abbreviated that to "3k-pound."

OP (me) copy-pasted the title exactly from the source page. Assuming the title at time of copy-paste was "3,000", I don't know how it became 3k. Is there an automatic search replace done by the HN submission process?

There is - on one occasion a submission of mine had the capitalization automatically changed (incorrectly as it happens). I don't know if this is what happened to you, but it seems likely.

I'm guessing it is 3k pounds now it has been turned into stone, rather than when the triceratops wore it on the end of its neck..

Yes, see my estimate for another skull: http://johnbokma.com/blog/2016/08/20/verifying-the-weight-of...

do you have an estimate for the original skull weight? That link just cross references the mineral weight..

edit, wondering if dinosaur skulls had cavities like bird skulls to keep the weight down..

That's easy to calculate. We don't know which mineral it was this time, but taking an estimate of 3.7 g/cm³ from his post,

Taking an estimate of 3.7 g/cm³ (but we don't know which mineral was in this case), and assuming something like 1.5 for bone density (which is at the higher side, but I'm allowing that these protective plates may be a lot denser than the skull bones themselves, no idea if it's correct though) that would be like 1200 lbs.

They did indeed. They developed the cavities to deal with the huge size they attained, but that tech came in handy millions of years later when they/some reprofiled to flight.

"Although the coronavirus pandemic derailed plans and typical course credit could not be offered, students signed up for the excursion anyway."

Kudos to these volunteers!

press release from dig team at Westminister, MO college https://news.wcmo.edu/campus-life/westminster-college-underg...

This contains more information than the link in the OP.

Not only that but the one linked in the OP is 404

Interesting because since the time when this was actually news in late-August 2020 and USA Today linked the press release, the college has moved to a new domain and for whatever reason didn't keep the old site up or redirect.

Point being, story is old.

Is it that heavy because it petrified? I wonder how much it would've weighed as just bone.

Yes, a fossilized (not petrified) object has a density similar to stone, typically around 2.7 kg/m^3. Bones, like most living tissues, have a density close to 1. So to a first approximation, this would have weighed 1,000 lbs when alive, comparable to the head of a modern elephant.

You’re suggesting that a cubic meter of stone weighs just 3 kg (6.6 lbs)?

That doesn’t sound right.

He obviously meant 3 000 kg. Easy to make a mistake, since 3 kg would be 1 liter, which is more common way to think about densities.

2.7 Kg/dm³

(Just noticed that Unicode U+3379 is the DM CUBED glyph but doesn't render on the mac, unlike ㎣, ㎤, ㎦)

For the interested: according to a quick search, the head of an elephant weighs 400 kg (881 lbs), and among African elephants adult males weigh between 1800 (3968 lbs) and 6300 kg (13 889 lbs). They are heavy!

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