Posted on 02/01/2011 11:58:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
For fossil hunters, it represents one of those breakthrough moments.
A pterosaur has been found in China beautifully preserved with an egg.
The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time.
Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest.
David Unwin, a palaeobiologist in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, was part of the research team.
He told the BBC the discovery was astonishing: "If somebody had said to me a few years back that we would find this kind of association, I would just have laughed and said, 'yeah, maybe in a million years', because these sorts of things are incredibly rare."
Pterosaurs, also sometimes referred to as pterodactyls, dominated the skies in the Mesozoic Era, 220-65 million years ago. Although reptiles like the dinosaurs were plodding on the ground below them, they were not actually dinosaurs themselves - a common misconception.
This particular specimen has been dated to about 160 million years ago.
It was found by Junchang Lü and colleagues and excavated from sedimentary rocks in the famous fossil-hunting grounds of Liaoning Province in China. Liaoning has yielded many of the great finds in recent years, including a series of feathered dinos that have transformed thinking on bird evolution.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Neat pictures of the fossil at link.
What palaeontologists do in their private time is their own business, but I really don't need to hear about it.
Let the Helen Thomas joke begin.
Ping!
I guess these guys are into PILFs.
I wonder how
all these millions of fossils worldwide
were so rapidly formed
with no tissue decay
before the fossilization process
could occur............................
FR continues to plunge headlong into a pit of blasphemous hell by allowing articles with un-Godly and ridiculous references to a multi-million year-old earth to be posted. This is a pro God site, and God tells us that the earth is NOT 160 million years old.
No tissue decay?
The fossil in this case HAS NO TISSUE, it has all decayed. What is left over is mineral deposits that have replaced the organic decaying tissue matter - in a process called fossilization.
So, does this now clear up the age old question of: What came first...the Pterosaur or the egg?
The female fossil partially prepared (A). After being fully prepared (B), the egg is clear to see (red circle)
It was the males which carried a crest, the latest research published in Science magazine suggests
Still, you have to agree that out of the trillions upon trillions of creatures who have ever lived it is amazing that a few tens of thousand fossils have been found...
Still begs the question, Which came first, the pterosaur or the egg?
God told us no such thing. The Earth is, in fact, closer to 4,600,000,000 years old.
i like the theory that God stuck a bunch of fossils in the ground just to mess with later “scientists’” heads
:)
Yes, it is amazing that out of trillions of creatures that have inhabited the Earth, the vast majority of which are now extinct (over 95%) - there are tens of thousands that got preserved well enough that we can tell the outline of their skeleton and the faint tracings of tissue outlines, sometimes enough to even tell if it had feathers or scales.
“Life finds a way.”
Well, He likes His little jokes...
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