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 don't "know" that I'll get NO response.
I *suspect* that any answer I do get will be shallow and dismissive of the problems I noted associated with the C14 variable ratio proposition.
All we can do is try, I guess.
What is amusing is that this putative flood changed not only the carbon concentrations, but also concentrations of chemicals other than carbon. Potassium, argon, uranium, lead, etc., had their isotopic ratios changed so as to exactly change the estimated age of the Earth to aboutt 4.5ga. Likewise the O16 and O18 ratios were changed exactly as the C12 and C14 ratios.
It's not so much that things may change in a flood (though, such changes are not observed in any subsequent flooding), but that the changes were coordinated exactly so as to fool people into getting the results no matter what method is used. (You may breathe now.)
That sentence was so long that I used Alta Vista to translate it into German and back: It's emergency much that things May CHANGE in A flood (though, look for CHANGES of acres emergency observed in any subsequent flooding), but that in such a way the CHANGES were coordinated exactly so as tons fool people into getting the results NO more matt what method is used.
hehhehheh... completely concretely...
I didn't want to go into the potassium, uranium, and argon isotopes... I don't know enough about 'em to get the same kind of punchline as in 118:3:j
;)
Yeah, but my brains disappear when I get near a good set of hips.
flooddidit
"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."
And all of those pieces of evidence have criticisms. In addition, they are at variance with other dating methods (such as helium escape in zircons, C14 dating, etc.)
The fact is that the major piece of evidence used for dating rocks is fossils, and the date of the rock is used to assign dates to the remaining fossils.
However, this assumes that we know how long a certain species is extant, which we do not. There are many species that are extant today which ONLY have fossils from much earlier periods.
"have you (or they) ever tried to wash the carbon into or out of organic matter using water?"
You're missing the point. It's not about washing out, it's about burial. The flood buried massive amounts of organic material, which took it out of the biosphere. This is where we get coal, fossils, and all the other stuff in the geologic column.
As I mentioned, the amount of atmospheric C14 remained relatively constant between before-the-flood and after-the-flood. It is the amount of carbon in the biosphere which decreased so dramatically, thus making the C14 generated in the atmosphere more prevalent percentage-wise.
you really didn't read my reply, did you?
read it again.
read it carefully.
the "amount of carbon in the biosphere" is irrelevant. It is the amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere which pertains.
read it again.
read it carefully.
shoot for comprehension this time.
yep: as suspected, the eventual reply was indeed shallow and dismissive.
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.
---
Many different cultures (Native Americans to Chinese) have global flood accounts as part of their oral tradition. Explain that fact.
"Someone posted a while ago..." Talk about peer-review.
easy: until the advent of mechanical transport, most people lived and died within 30miles of the place where they were born. A local flood to such an isolated primitive would indeed seem to be a world-drowner. Add generations of the "telephone game" effect as oral traditions are handed down, and a piddly little flood gets built up into Oroborus Eats The World.
Moreover, 15,000 years or so ago, there WAS a massive global flood which inundated the coastlines of all the continents, raising the sea-level an hundred or more feet, drowning miles and miles and miles of coastal plain... where most folks lived... in a relatively sudden flood. This flood was accompanied by massive climatic shifts and widespread torrential rains. These rains swept the Sahara on-and-off for decades, as an example.
We call it "the end of the last glacial period"
Primitive cultures live and die by what the rivers around them do. Pretty much all early agrarian cultures arose around rivers. It's not surprising that stories about terrible floods are common.
The Egyptians kept detailed written records of pretty much everything that went on in their kingdom. By 2500 BC, the Old Kingdom was in full swing. And yet, there is no mention in Egyptian records of any global flood. How do you explain that?
or a baby-killing nazi... can't forget to include those choice epithets
Not sure there isnt. They do have a water God. Reading about him leads you to different kinds of stories about floods. Beyond that though there are other cultures that record it.
People will view the historical records along with the myths and legends from different peoples at the time as support of the Biblical flood.
I guess it depends on your perspective.
Yes, they had to flap their little arms really hard.
Sanddidit.
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