Ya gotta love 'em!
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."
If you have a closed, airtight system, then water does not continue to evaporate until there is no liquid water left. Rather, water evaporates until there is a certain, temperature dependent, partial pressure of water vapor present in the system. Once this partial pressure has been achieved, then evaporation stops. If mineral deposits on the bone surface sealed it off making an airtight system, then it is entirely possible that the equillibrium water vapor would be reached rather quickly thereafter, and further evaporation would be halted.
Recently?
I guess us Crevo's are the poorer ones here, as not much positive stuff is written 'bout US, either!
I guess my question would be:
If the languages 'evolved' to stay within a tight little group, then why haven't those humans got physical characteristics that differ markedly from their 'remote' relatives?
Don't be coy. You Crevos do nothing but write about yourself and your viewpoints.
Indo-European languages "evolved" from a common ancestor, which linguists call Indo-European.
then why haven't those humans got physical characteristics that differ markedly from their 'remote' relatives?
Different groups of humans look different, of course. Be that as it may, comparing language development to human evolution is kind of silly.
Ya gotta love 'em!
Why??
Wouldn't your same rules apply??
WhAt is slang but mutations in the word streaM?
There must be SOME 'selection process' that accepts and keeps new words and drops older ones.
Why??
You've got E folks that whip out an 'evolving' software program and claim that somehow IT shows how ET is supposed to work.
Languages have too much of an aspect of "intelligent design" to really be comparable to biological evolution.
Not really. A lot of language is consciously and intentionally designed.
Although the fundamental premise of the creationist approach emphasized the infallibility of literal reading of the bible, few were as aware as those who hold the bible as a daily guide to their lives that the good book was rife with improbabilities and in some cases outright contradictions. Whitcomb and Morris, in one of those necessary departures from literal reading of the scriptures that nonetheless surprise anyone trying to follow their reasoning, concluded that the traditional Ussher flood date of 2450 BC (or its variant of 2459 BC) is probably too recent. On the other hand, noting the similarity of the Sumerian and Biblical flood stories, they consider it impossible that the flood could be vastly older than the stories because the Sumerian version (having been passed on by mere oral tradition, rather than having its truth covered by a divine assurance) was so strikingly similar to the biblical account; surely it would never have retained its similarity to the biblical story if the two traditions had bifurcated many thousands of years before their respective recordings in the first millennium B.C.
Morris quotes one authority who places the date at 3835 BC (based on Abraham birth date of 2167 BC and 1688 years elapsed time between birth of Abraham and flood (John Urquhart, How Old is Man, 1904 Morris p 481)) Elsewhere Morris suggests that the date was in excess of 5000 years ago, though he allowed that some interpretations suggesting that as much as 5000 years had elapsed between the deluge and Abram, which pushes the date of the flood as far back as 7000 BC, stretched the limits of Genesis "almost to the breaking point."
Most ingenious of the recent creationist claims have been those of G.E. Aardsma whose recent paper (Radio carbon and Biblical Chronology ) argues that the Ussher chronology (flood at 2350 B.C.) is too short by exactly a millennium. According to this interpretation, Kings 6:1 should read "1480 years" not "480 years," Aardsma believes; correction of this apparent clerical error would then push Usshers flood date back to 3350 B.C.
http://www.stanford.edu/~meehan/donnelly/bibchron.html
The long and the short of it is that I don't know exactly when 'The Flood' occured. You said that "Papyrus was invented around 3000 BC." Estimates for the flood range from as recent as 2350 BC to an improbable 7000 BC.
Not necessarily. If the original atmosphere had a pretty constant high humidity, then the evaporation rate would be very slow. In order to maintain the proper vapor pressure in a small, enclosed space, not much water is really needed. Even without an originally humid atmosphere, only some mechanism for sealing is needed, not fossilization to prevent further evaporation. Fossilization can occur after this alternative mechanism occurs. The alternative could be something as simple as immersion underwater or in mud, which would pretty much prevent the water vapor inside the enclosure from escaping.
Oxygen is needed for things to burn. And I am a Chemist, at least by proffesion, a Molecular Biologist by training.
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