Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016)

#41

Post by MrDam » Tue, May 22, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #36

Retric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drastic difference between 12mph and 25mph is where our problems would show up. Many predators can do 20+ mph for long enough to eat us. Polar Bear's top out at around 25MPH but they can sustain that long enough that the safe distance is around 1/2 mile. Brown Bear's are worse making running a bad idea. Endurance hunting is far more effective in very high temperatures so it's use as likely limited.

Humans are group animals. Try and stalk an individual wolf in a pack as an individual (even with a rifle) and let me know how it goes. You'd be lucky to live and tell the tale. Humans are the same. Getting the better of an individual human ... so easy it's hardly worth mentioning. Same with the wolf. Doing the same in a group of 100 humans, even a single individual in that group ? You won't survive the attempt. In al…

Reminded me of a video that depicts thousands of African tribesman and their dogs on a mass hunt. It's awful to watch but it gives you an idea of how our ancestors hunted thousands and tens of thousands of years ago.

Again, it's heart wrenching to watch them take down elephants and the like, but if you're still interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipn5rSQ2PY4

Re: Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016)

#42

Post by dvtv75 » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:28 AM UTC

Larrikin wrote: post #2

Is this the first discovery of color for dinosaurs?

If you do a search, you'll get a number of links (the farthest back I found was 2010) on feather color. I found one popsci article that describes how it was determined:

https://www.popsci.com/discover-color-dinosaur

Re: Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016)

#43

Post by anfilt » Wed, May 23, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

ggg9990 wrote: post #40

anfilt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are able to get any DNA out amber that would be amazing. From what I understand DNA is not stable for that long. If we are able to get any DNA it would probably be inferred some microscopic structures or something left behind from the DNA. However, even then I doubt it would be complete. So why it would be amazing it would just be tiny fragments of DNA. I doubt we will even get a tiny fragment. So highly doubt…

If you imagine finding some big stash of amber with, say, 1 million different dinosaur fragments preserved, you could imagine using some statistical techniques combined with knowledge of extant related species to put something together.

yea and from my understanding it's only ~500 years or so. So a 160 million years is how old the article says that amber is. So that means what ever amount of dna would have been gone through it's half life over 300,000 times. Just thinking about that makes me absolutely certain that we would not even find an intact base-pair, and a single base pair is not even useful for cloning.

It's not happening unless there is some natural mechanism that increase that half life of DNA quite a bit, and is stable for millions of years. Otherwise we would need the DNA to leave some byproduct that we can detect.

Re: Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016)

#44

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 01, 2018, 2:38 PM UTC

Nomentatus wrote: post #39

cvaidya1986 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reversing back the clock on evolution feels counter productive.

As is getting dentures, but it's more fun turning back the clock that way than not getting dentures (if those teeth are gone.) I vote for fun and discovery. And corn on the cob.

[deleted]