Scientists find preserved dinosaur embryo preparing to hatch like a bird

Point remains, though, that for a species (or possibly family) that existed on Earth for a few million years (Wikipedia gives 68--66 mya, so only 2 million years, same article you cite) ... has turned up probably fewer than 100 surviving specimens, out of an estimated total 2.5 billions which had ever existed. That's literally a one-in-amillion chance of fossilisation, preservation, and discovery, so far.

Words can have different meanings in different contexts.

In the context of dinosaurs “perfectly preserved” means that even fine details can be discerned in the fossils. And yes fossils are rocks. Someone who knows the minimal amount about dinos will know this, and even if it’s the first time you encounter the concept the article explains it nicely.

Titles are titles. They are short and thus they can’t provide a treatrise on the sum of all human knowledge. You need common sense to parse them.

No, it doesn't. It means something protected from decay, or kept intact, or protected.

It's common to preserve food in vinegar, sugar or salt, often after cooking it.

It's common to preserve plant and animals for study by drying them or pickling them (e.g. alcohol/formaldehyde).

"Fossils are the preserved remains of plants and animals whose bodies were buried in sediments, such as sand and mud, under ancient seas, lakes and rivers."[0]

Or the Natural History Museum:

"A fossil is physical evidence of a prehistoric plant or animal. This may be their preserved remains or other traces, such as marks they made in the ground while they were alive."[1]

[0]: https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discovering-geology/fossils-and-geolog...

[1]: A fossil is physical evidence of a prehistoric plant or animal. This may be their preserved remains or other traces, such as marks they made in the ground while they were alive.

In phylogenetic taxonomy: (1) that's exactly what it means, and (2) that's why Aves is within Dinosauria.

Doesn't the term "avian dinosaur" in some sense mean "survived K-Pg"?

If you can retrieve enough segments, you might try some sort of Bayesian inference. You start with the DNA of the common ancestor of reptiles and dinosaurs (and therefore birds). You don’t know what it was, but you know that it evolved into the current reptiles and birds via random mutations followed by adaptive selections. You get a posterior for it, then you use it as a prior for the DNA of the dino for which you have sequenced a number of segments.

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/gene-expressi...

Not a rhetorical question so much as a follow up. I don’t know the answer to your question.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/32/2/406/1054064

Complex life --- multicellular life with differentiated structures --- took another 3.4 billion years to form, emerging only about 600 million years ago.

Much of the biological hardware and processes for intelligence seems to have emerged with the first mammals (~200 million years ago), particularly emotional-hormonal systems that seem broadly common. It still took most of the intervening time for clever apes to emerge (about 2 million years ago), with anatomically modern humans showing up 200,000 years ago. When language developed isn't clear, but likely by degrees somewhere between 2 million and 50,000 years ago.

(There's a great presentation on the anthropological evidence of complex thinking in this 2012 presentation by Sander van der Leeuw: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug 69 minutes, most of the meat is in the first 20--30 minutes, high-density information.)

And modern technological society is really about 200 years old, with "peak invention" being variously defined, but the 50 to 100 years beginning about 1875 would be a good choice.

So: over 4.6 billion years, life has existed for over 4 billion, and developed complex and technological intelligence only within the past 1 million years, and quite possibly substantially less. That's 0.02% of the total time.

Earth itself will remain generally habitable for only about another 800 million years. If humans or other intelligent species survive over that period, they'll still account for less than 15% of the history of life on Earth.

Considering intelligence to be inevitable is ... somewhat poorly supported, at least based on that timeline.

(Related, see the Drake Equation, and yes, we're working with a single sample study and numerous unknowns.)

I assume you would say humans are the dominant life form of the present day earth, and many would agree with that. Ants are more numerous, cattle and antarctic krill are heavier by biomass so clearly such simple metrics are not what we are after.

And clearly back when humans started developing “higher inteligence” they were just funny monkeys running around the savana harased by jackals left and right. Very much not a “dominant life form” in any sense of the word. One could attribute any special significance to them only in hindsight by what they become, rather than what they were.

We don't know if there's some special sauce that makes humans unique.

Intelligence is in no way the best tool to guarantee reproduction, there's absolutely no inevitability to it. Grass reproduces just fine without intelligence. There's species practically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

There is no evolutionary plan or roadmap, it's random mutations.

Complexity affords efficiency advantages, though usually with a resilience cost. Over the period in which that advantage exists, it's beneficial. A sufficient shock could (and frequently has) greatly negated the benefits of complexity.