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Revelation 4:11
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Posted on 06/02/2005 2:06:01 PM PDT by dread78645
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur that died 68 million years ago has provided some of the strongest evidence yet that birds are the closest-living relatives of dinosaurs, scientists said on Thursday.
Soft tissue found in the animal's thighbone strongly suggests it was a female, and just about to lay eggs, the researchers report.
The bone tissue is strongly similar to that made inside the bones of female birds -- and no other living type of animal -- when they are producing the hard shells of eggs just before they lay them, said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
"In addition to demonstrating gender, it also links the reproductive physiology of dinosaurs to birds very closely. It indicates that dinosaurs produced and shelled their eggs much more like modern birds than like modern crocodiles," Schweitzer told reporters in a telephone briefing.
Female birds produce a layer of bone tissue called medullary bone when they are laying eggs. It is rich in calcium, providing minerals that would otherwise be leached from harder bone material, leaving the bird susceptible to fractures.
"The way that crocodiles lay and shell their eggs is they hold them in their reproductive tract and shell them all at once," Schweitzer said.
"Birds shell their eggs one at a time as they move down through the reproductive tract. It is a pretty calcium-intensive process."
ALREADY A STAR
This particular T. rex fossil made headlines in March when the same team of paleontologists reported it contained preserved soft tissue -- the first ever found in a dinosaur bone.
"The reason that we have found all the things in this one particular animal is this specimen was in a very remote part of Montana, in the Hell Creek formation," said Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies and Montana State University.
"It was so far out in the country that we needed to helicopter it out and we actually had to split the thighbone into two pieces to get it into the helicopter."
When Schweitzer unwrapped the cracked-open femur she immediately saw the soft tissue and went to work proving its remarkable state of preservation.
Horner plans to crack open some other bones.
"We have 12 specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex here at this institution, and we are about to find out if any more of them are females, just by looking inside," he said.
It was a stroke of luck to find an animal at just the right stage to be making medullary bone, Schweitzer said.
"It would not be present in a brooding animal," she said.
"But it would be present as long as there was an egg left to lay. The animal was probably near the end of its laying cycle."
Finding another such specimen will be difficult.
"I think it is pretty much a long shot," she said.
In April, Tamaki Sato of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and colleagues reported they had found the fossil of a dinosaur in China that carried two eggs in its body.
Its physiology also was closer to modern birds than to modern crocodiles, Sato reported.
Horner said most experts are convinced the two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods were closely related to living birds.
"This is another piece to the puzzle and there are a lot of them," he said. "Anyone who would argue that birds and dinosaurs are not related -- frankly I'd put them in the Flat Earth Society group."
I'm having some trouble with the image of the momma rex climbing into the nest with all the baby rex eggs and then, you know, sitting down.
Possible titles for the video:
(1) Honey, I Squashed the Kids!
{2} Guess Who's Coming to Breakfast?
It's more than hips. We birth early and the bulk of brain development occurs outside the mother's body. Stimulation by lights, sounds and adults while the brain is growing must have huge implications for intelligence.
The soft skull, cartilaginous fingers, reduced jaw, and underdeveloped lungs indicate the human infants are born "prematurely" compared to the other primates. To reach an equivalent stage, humans would have to have a gestation of about 18-20 months.
I think the point is that if the specimin has been protected against oxygen, the soft tissue could be preserved. As with insects in amber.
I actually know the researcher who discovered the fossilized soft tissue.
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Interesting. You say that the researcher found 'fossilized soft tissue'? If I read the story right it (the material inside the bone) was NOT fossilized. Isn't fossilization when the original organic material is replaced with minerals? Looks to me like the original material is remaining.
Is anyone else waiting to see a rib turn into a woman?
Excuse me, but isn't it a proven medical fact that men have one fewer rib bones than a woman?
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No. For the same reason if you lost a finger, your children would still be born with ten fingers.
To my knowledge, they haven't yet conducted the research to uncover precisely what are the molecules of these structures (whether they consist of the original organic components or whether their structures have been preserved by some method akin to mineralization). What they did do is chemically dissolve the minerals from the structure, which resulted in the bone matrix material that they've been studying. They've since duplicated the process with several other dinosaur specimens, so this actually challenges the entire concept of how organic specimens become fossilized (the prevailing view had been that you're left with nothing but minerals).
BTW, I asked exactly that question myself and that's basically the answer I got.
I used to know a guy who worked with plant fossils; he claimed that the protoplasm in plant cells was replaced by minerals but the cell walls generally were intact. He had lots of slides (microscope, not 35mm) of old ferns and palms which looked just like a slide from a living plant. He used the vascular structure to build the tree family tree from the fossil trees.
Is it too late to join the dinosaur clan?
I guess we can inject some frog DNA up Jurassic. Ooh-that's not rated PG. Sorry.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1369945/posts
Revelation 4:11
See my profile for info
"Well, seeing that it was found in a 70 million year-old bone, how old could it be?"
Oh, yes, I forgot, the found the death certificate right next to the bones.
"IIRC, the YEC crowd has this novel notion that C14 dating is perfectly accurate right up to 6-10,000 years ago, and then suddenly becomes utterly bogus."
Actually, many YEC's believe that C14 dating is completely accurate, as long as you account for changes in the C14 ratio in the biosphere. For example, approximately 4,500 years ago, the flood drastically changed that ratio.
The C14 ratio in the environment is governed by (a) the amount of carbon in the biosphere, and (b) the amount of C14 generated in the atmosphre.
(b) remains relatively constant. However, the flood (as evidenced by the geologic column) drastically altered (a), removing a lot of carbon from the biosphere. Therefore, the C14 ratio pre-flood would have been much smaller than the C14 ratio post-flood. Therefore, measuring based on current C14 assumptions would yield older dates for things buried before and during the flood. When you adjust C14 dates to take this into account, many YECs maintain that the results are accurate to the biblical timeline.
Criticisms like this get tiresome. If you've been on these threads for any amount of time, you've seen the mountains of evidence for the various dating methods. You don't accept them? Fine. Provide some evidence from a peer-reviewed source refuting the evidence.
Some scientific facts are so heavily supported by the evidence that it is a waste of everyone's time to keep discussing them.
You'd probably want one of the pack hunters instead of a lone hunter like T-Rex. The social instinct is one of the reasons why you can have a 150 pound pet dog but not a 150 pound pet cat. Social animals are much less likely to decide to eat members of their pack.
Please provide some evidence for this claim.
hrmn...
sounds rather silly on the face of it, but, for once, the YEC's have come up with a testable hypothesis.
1. have you (or they) ever tried to wash the carbon into or out of organic matter using water? Do you (or they) understand the problem with the notion that one can use water to wash carbon atoms -let alone specifically just the radioisotopes- into or out of the organic chemical molecular compounds of which flesh and bone are composed?
This rather dubious capacity of water is required to explain the gradation of C14 content in the fossil record - otherwise, all the fossils supposedly laid down by the flood would date out to be about the same age, uniformly much, MUCH older than 4,500 years.
2. Carbon enters the food chain (and, thus, into animal tissues) principally through the photosynthesis performed by plants and photosynthetic algae and bacteria, converting atmospheric CO2 and nutrients leached from the soil into organic (carbon-based) compounds and free atmospheric oxygen.
How, exactly, would precipitation of any volume, type, or duration selectively scrub out the free atmospheric non-radioisotopic CO2, leaving CO2 containing C14 alone?
This rather dubious capacity of precipitation is required by the assertion that "...account for changes in the C14 ratio in the biosphere. For example, approximately 4,500 years ago, the flood drastically changed that ratio."
3. If indeed the flood "changed the ratio" of C14-bearing CO2:mundane CO2, by removing mundane CO2 from the atmosphere, then by comparing the supposed time of this notional event to the oldest dates one can establish through C14 dating it seems to me that the composition of the atmosphere was radically different.
a.4,500 years is roughly 1/11th of the useful range of C14 dating.
b. the oldest "mistaken" C14 dates for "pre-flood" fossils (50,000years) is supposedly caused by a vastly different ratio of atmospheric C14-O2 : Cmundane-O2
c. the total carbon content of a "pre-flood" cow is identical to that of a "post-flood" cow
d. the only way the ratio could be changed would be by a drastic "pre-flood" elevation of the total CO2 content of the atmosphere.
With me so far? Ok...
e. Ignoring half-life calculations (as the C14 halflife is 5730 years, this is safe enough), the "pre-flood" CO2 level in the atmosphere MUST have been about 11 times what it was "immediately after the flood" (and continues to be today).
f. The current by-volume content of CO2 in air is roughly 3% (3 parts per hundred)
g. ELEVEN TIMES that amount is 33 parts per hundred-and-thiry, or 25.4% of a much heavier atmosphere than we have today.
h. Questions of the environmental impact of such a concentration of greenhouse gas aside, this level of CO2 is approaches the threshold of LETHALITY to all terrestrial animal life - 30% is the threshold.
i. bearing in mind that CO2 is heavier than oxygen and nitrogen, ground-level displacement of these gasses by CO2 would certainly have led to surface concentrations of CO2 well above the 30% mark.
j. According to this postulate put forth by the YEC crowd, it would seem that terrestrial animal life "before the flood" was utterly impossible.
These are just off-the-cuff problems that I, as a complete layman, can spot in the YEC C14 ratio proposal. I'm certain wiser heads can rip it far more thoroughly asunder.
#118 might amuse you :)
You know you won't get a response to 118, right? They'll just brush it aside and move on to something else.
Someone posted a while ago that we have written records from Egyptian pharaohs who lived at about the same time as the supposed flood. Yet, none of them mention anything about such a deluge. No one has explained that, either.
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