posted
Body armor? Now it sounds like a combination of battle bots and Indycar.
I'd have to say without riders, they'd have to be pretrained. As far as accessories, if you can fit it on the raptor it's fair game. Mine will have a mini buzz saw attached to his dew claw.
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Sadly you'll notice that there is no mention of DNA in the article. Indeed I would be positively floored if there was any meaningful fragment of DNA present in the bone. If they can sequence the protein the can compare its structure to existing proteins and find possible orthologs (conserved proteins between species) or perhaps simply conserved domains. It's still fascinating, but it's nowhere near cloning.
Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
You sure can, but if all you have are your dreams you should dream bigger. Like talking dinosaur pets with frikkin laser beams on their heads or summin'.
Posts: 3243 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
The article did mention protein sequencing, and made a careful warning that DNA is much more fragile than protein, and that they would be lucky to get the protein out right. But the scientist in charge said she wouldn't comment on the DNA since she wasn't in that field.
Would the raptors have sponsorships? there could be a John Deere Raptor.
The Budweiser Raptor.
The Windex Raptor, Energizer Raptor. Of course the Lowes Raptor.
Personally I'd hold out for Rolls Royce. The Rolls Royce Raptor. Alliteration really is the key.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I'm going to put tassles on my raptor's elbows, and mount a flag at the base of it's tail. Oh, and I'm going to have the geneticists tinker with mine a bit and add a built in banana seat.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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On a semi-related note, my son woke us up today with his dinosaur impression. Well, he said "Lion! Tiger! Dinosaur! RrRRRAAArRrh!!" anyway. Posts: 5422 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I get my bike Saturday. Let me know when you pick up your raptor, and I'll start crying in my beer. Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Well, I can probably get him to say Liger. It is sometimes hard to tell what he says, anyway. The roar gave it away today. Posts: 5422 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I can already imagine the ad campaign. The Raptor, featuring industry leading anti-theft system. The Raptor, 25 highway mile per chicken. The Raptor, now with XM satelite radio.
Posts: 421 | Registered: Jan 2001
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No, since raptors preceded chickens by millions of years, we would have to conclude that chicken tastes like raptor. The new phrase would enter our lexicon, except for stubborn old people who persisted in saying "tastes like chicken".
Posts: 1021 | Registered: Sep 2004
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The answer to the ultimate question has been answered. What came first. The chicken or the Egg. The answer of course is the raptor.
Posts: 421 | Registered: Jan 2001
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No guys, Jay's right. There's not a morning I get up where I don't wonder how I'm going to help plunge the world into darkness. I can't even get a forkful of waffles to my mouth without fuming over my jealous anger.
Sometimes my scientist friends and I get together and scheme on how we're going to use our evil science knowledge to open up a portal to hell so the antichrist can come out.
We're always foiled by that clever Jesus and friends, though. Curses! We would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling Christians!
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Silly jatraqueros. T. rexes are carnivores, and generally speaking, it's not healthy for humans to eat carnivores (more chance of catching nasty diseases). Which is why cows, sheep, and vegetarians are more popularly eaten. Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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"Girl Genius" comic has mimmoths -- mouse-sized mammoths that escaped and became pests. Mimmoth-on-a-stick is a popular treat.
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The process of fossilization involves replacement of cellular material (protein, fat, etc.) by minerals. Essentially, the thing becomes a rock that reveals some details of the original living tissue because it sort of outlines structures, etc.
Typically, bones fossilize and soft tissues do not. In rare circumstances, you get fossil impressions of the soft structures, e.g., the Burgess Shale deposits.
Now, this is something else entirely. This is tissue that has retained it's character as actual tissue -- just dead forms of previously living matter.
How could that happen? And how could it last for millions of years? I haven't researched this (not even Google) but I have some probably good guesses:
1) It'd have to be an anerobic environment. Anything exposed to airborne bacteria would've decayed in months or at most years, not millions of years, or even thousands of years. Since this was found in sandstone, the likelihood is that the animal died and was subsumed under the soil rather rapidly, thus cutting off the supply of air.
2) The leaching of minerals into the tissue must've been somehow inordinately slow or somehow halted. The composition of the sandstonestone in which it is found might be the key here.
Again, I'm just guessing, but the articles are talking about this kind of thing not being all that uncommon.
Jay... I feel it's my duty to at least point out to you that you are doing what you accuse others of. You have a fixed, predetermined idea of how things work and try to bend all evidence to it. The fact that science specifically doesn't work that way, at least not in the long run, means that typically, science yields answers that better fit the available data and observations. In the best case, science works from theories that eventually are either supplanted by theories that better fit observation & data, or gain adherents to the point where few (if any) doubt their veracity.
It all depends ultimately on the power to explain observation.
Your theory, in contrast, relies on the assumption (unproven) that all the observations over all the years in paleontology are not just wrong, but hopelessly mired in error. Once that is taken to be true, then a theory that ignores all the data can be proposed and defended. As could any theory one wanted.
That's not science.
Science and religion are only incompatible when people try to make them do things they were never designed to do. They speak the wrong languages to be effective as explanations for things to which they don't apply.
For example: Science does not really work on things like "the meaning of life" or the existence of souls. That doesn't mean some scientists wouldn't want to try, but that the usual methods don't apply and most of these attempts are viewed as, well...unscientific.
Likewise, religion doesn't really work well for things like mechanisms of creation. Basically, the story in Genesis is all we have for Judaism and it's been adopted wholesale for Christianity. But it is incomplete, demonstrably inaccurate in terms of some parts of the sequencing, and most of the world views it as allegory, not to be taken literally.
The attempts to use AS SCIENCE don't really work very well -- they aren't convincing to most people -- because even a moderately strong commitment to hypothesis testing and fact-based theorizing shoots the literal biblical account full of holes. Some people have tried to put together a more scientific version that retains some consistency with the Bible. Most people remain unconvinced of these theories too because 1) they don't generate testable hypotheses, and 2) they rely on being able to throw out contrary evidence. The latter, from a scientific point of view is death to a theory.
Theories, to be viable, have to account for more of the evidence than competing theories. A theory that starts with "all the contrary evidence is flawed" is more like a parody of science than actual science.
Sure, there are questions about methods for dating finds, contamination among layers happens during digs, etc. But the people who latch onto these things are going beyond the bounds of reason. They don't say "well, these dates are uncertain, but they're within a range between xxxx and yyyy." Instead they say "these dates are uncertain, and therefore the method of dating is completely flawed, should be thrown out, and therefore the Earth really could be 12,000 years old, or so."
As soon as you do that, you aren't talking science and the discussion is over.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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quote:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How about brontosaur
I hate to be a stickler, urban, but "brontosaur" has not been considered a valid genera since 1976. What you want is an Apatosaurus steak.
Posts: 1021 | Registered: Sep 2004
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actually I know the name changed (I'm urban btw). I just like the oldschool name better, that's the name I grew up with Posts: 796 | Registered: Mar 2005
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That’s nice. I believe differently so of course that makes me an idiot. Fine. I accept you alls theory. It would be nice if you’d quit taking me out of context. I didn’t say anything about scientists just that theories that are misinterpreting the facts. Creation scientists use biology and archeology too, they just have a different base on how they draw up their theories.
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Dinosaur soft tissue find—a stunning rebuttal of “millions of years” We previously announced the discovery of what seemed to be microscopic red blood cells (and immunological evidence of hemoglobin) in dinosaur bone (see Sensational dinosaur blood report! and response to critic).1 Now a further announcement, involving the same scientist (Montana University’s Dr Mary Schweitzer) stretches (pun intentional) the long-age paradigm beyond belief. Not only have more blood cells been found, but also soft, fibrous tissue, and complete blood vessels. The fact that this really is unfossilized soft tissue from a dinosaur is in this instance so obvious to the naked eye that any scepticism directed at the previous discovery is completely “history”. One description of a portion of the tissue was that it is “flexible and resilient and when stretched returns to its original shape”.2 The exciting discovery was apparently made when researchers were forced to break open the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil to lift it by helicopter. The bone was still largely hollow and not filled up with minerals as is usual. Dr Schweitzer used chemicals to dissolve the bony matrix, revealing the soft tissue still present.3 She has been cited as saying that the blood vessels were flexible, and that in some instances, one could squeeze out their contents. Furthermore, she said, “The microstructures that look like cells are preserved in every way.” She also is reported as commenting that “preservation of this extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen in a dinosaur before.” It appears that this sort of thing has not been found before mainly because it was never looked for. Schweitzer was probably alert to the possibility because of her previous serendipitous discovery of T. rex blood cells. (It appears that the fossils were sent to her to look for soft tissues, prior to preservative being applied, because of her known interest.) In fact, Schweitzer has since found similar soft tissue in several other dinosaur specimens! The reason that this possibility has long been overlooked seems obvious: the overriding belief in “millions of years”. The long-age paradigm (dominant belief system) blinded researchers to the possibility, as it were. It is inconceivable that such things should be preserved for (in this case) “70 million years”. Will they now be convinced? Unfortunately, the long-age paradigm is so dominant that facts alone will not readily overturn it. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out,4 what generally happens when a discovery contradicts a paradigm is that the paradigm is not discarded but modified, usually by making secondary assumptions, to accommodate the new evidence. That’s just what appears to have happened in this case. When Schweitzer first found what appeared to be blood cells in a T. Rex specimen, she said, “It was exactly like looking at a slice of modern bone. But, of course, I couldn’t believe it. I said to the lab technician: “The bones, after all, are 65 million years old. How could blood cells survive that long?’”5 Notice that her first reaction was to question the evidence, not the paradigm. That is in a way quite understandable and human, and is how science works in reality (though when creationists do that, it’s caricatured as non-scientific). So will this new evidence cause anyone to stand up and say there’s something funny about the emperor’s clothes? Not likely. Instead, it will almost certainly become an “accepted” phenomenon that even “stretchy” soft tissues must be somehow capable of surviving for millions of years. (Because, after all, we “know” that this specimen is “70 million years old”.) See how it works? Schweitzer’s mentor, the famous “Dinosaur Jack” Horner (upon whom Sam Neill’s lead character in the Jurassic Park movies was modeled) is already urging museums to consider cracking open some of the bones in their existing dinosaur fossils in the hope of finding more such “Squishosaurus” remains. He is excited about the potential to learn more about dinosaurs, of course. But—nothing about questioning the millions of years—sigh! I invite the reader to step back and contemplate the obvious. This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most.
posted
You're right, Jay. My grandfather always told me he rode T-Rexes to school. Now I know he was telling the truth. Modern bones of a dinosaur! I'm surprised Ford ever made it big in this country with all the dinosaurs lurking about.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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This 2,000 year old mummy is so well-preserved that "it can be autopsied by pathologists as if it were only recently dead."
That doesn't mean the Han dynasty was yesterday. It means that soft tissue remains in good condition for longer than was once thought under the right circumstances. If the radioisotope dates from the surrounding rock say 65 million, and the bones contain soft tissue, that to me is evidence that we came to the wrong conclusion about how soft tissue can last if preserved in certain ways. There's probably less evidence supporting the claim that soft tissue can't last, so that's the conclusion we ought to throw out first.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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And this is pretty cool, even if they can't actually do anything with what they find. Perhaps they'll figure something out from the blood, although the only other thing I can imagine is some kind of genetic disease that turns out to be the cause of the end of the dinosaurs .
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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