Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#11

Post by tokai »

nntwozz wrote: post #3
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history. A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

We're apes, friend.

Top pendantry. The words are interchangeable in daily speech. This is a comment section, not a journal.

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#12

Post by arnsholt »

dkga wrote: post #8

What a treasure indeed! I just didn‘t understand why this particular site had so well-preserved soft tissue fossils? I assume it is probably related to the geology of the site during formation of the fossils, and probably the researchers themselves are not quite sure. But I would love to know more, if anyone here understands about this sort of thing.

If I had to guess, they probably have some ideas. In Your inner fish (an excellent book, BTW) Neil Shubin has an afterword where he describes roughly how they went about deciding where to look for Tiktaalik. Basically, you start with whatever thing you want to find out more about; in the case of Tiktaalik, the transition of tetrapods from aquatic to terrestrial living. So you start by finding out where you have exposed sedimentary rocks of the correct age likely to be contain fossils. Next, you also need to the rocks to expose the right kind of environment: desert sands or deep ocean environments aren't going to help you find Tiktaalik, for that you need shallow waters and intertidal zones. Finally, it needs to be somewhere you can get to. So in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if they were purposefully looking for soft body preservation (especially since I think Cambrian fauna generally was quite soft and squishy).

From memory, to get fossilised soft tissues you want the remains to be buried extremely rapidly in an environment where the soft tissues don't decay (typically an anoxic environment, so for a shale basically covered in mud). So a mudslide is one option, and I think there are some lovely fossils North American from the end of the Cretaceous that are hypothesised to have been buried by the tidal wave caused by the Chicxulub impact.

Edit: After some googling, the Cretaceous fossils I was thinking of is Tanis,[0] which is in fact plausibly (but not universally) thought to be covered by the earthquake caused by the impact, before the tidal wave arrived.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanis_(fossil_site)

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#14

Post by compiler-devel »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history. A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

If we’re just another animal that can program computers, then I don’t feel bad about the take over of AI and LLMs as we’re nothing special in the evolutionary climb upwards.

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#16

Post by Cpoll »

greenbit wrote: post #7
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history. A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

Or maybe just before that, when they started wearing digital watches.

The first digital watch was from 1972.

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#17

Post by m0llusk »

nntwozz wrote: post #3
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history. A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

We're apes, friend.

It turns out to be more interesting than that. For example, there is no other ape with skin resembling that of marine mammals. And that is just a start. Mankind is seriously weird.

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#19

Post by astrobe_ »

throwup238 wrote: post #18
cess11 wrote: post #9

"the first major blossoming of modern biodiversity." What does "modern" mean in this discourse?

Most of the major phyla that exist today established themselves during the Cambrian explosion.

So "modern" is a synonym for "current" here, if one puts aside warnings about its decline due to human activity?

Re: A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life

#20

Post by simonh »

greenbit wrote: post #7
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

The Cambrian period has to be the most interesting period in Earth's history. A close second is the period where the monkeys started wearing clothes, driving cars and programming computers.

Or maybe just before that, when they started wearing digital watches.

While as a species we may have moved on from thinking digital watches are a really neat idea, some of us will always remain stuck in the past.
Post reply on HN