Fascinating feathered dinosaur fossil found

The Beeb had a story about a fascinating fossil discovery — a dinosaur with feathers that's 10 million years older than Archaeopteryx, and morphologically much more dinosaur-like.

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8273938.stm ]

Paleontologists have been saying that forms like this should exist, based on other things they know about how evolution works. It's always awesome to see predictions like this being corroborated in practice. Historical sciences are predictive too, you know — they just predict the past!

What's really fascinating to me is that something as insubstantial as a feather could leave an impression visible after 150 million years have passed. There's got to be some irony there, somewhere.


For some reason it also reminds me of the reaction I have to Egyptian mummies: the desire that drove the culture to preserve their dead intact for some sort of eternal existence after death did indeed preserve them for a very real existence thousands of years after death; just not perhaps exactly what they had in mind.

I remember them predicting it. Nice to see they found it finally. Dinosaurs could have been quite colorful with all those feathers.

There was one documentary about what would happen to the world if humans disappeared. Looking at what happened to chernobyl in just few decades even our biggest cities would disappear pretty quickly. Nature would retake everything. In the end the most visible signs would be the pyramids and that rockface in america. If theyd keed the mumies in the pyramids they would be preseved too.

My dream is to actually have and visit similar vast, abandoned cities … Imho it would be a great RPG experience, if the usual Fallout theme was completely taken away from it.

Meaning: Not after some kind of devastating fallout or another catastrophy, but rather like … in the game "Inherit The earth".

In one dream I was even visiting a kind of abandoned place …

I think it would be to much later Archaeologists like us trying to solve the secrets of the Aztekes, with their huge cities deep within the jungle forests … The problem would be much harder though, because we don't leave stone carvings behind …

In fact to some archaeologists the Christians wouldn't be too different from the Aztekes, once they find out that the Christians use a torture tool as their religion's primary symbol ... Imagine Archaeologists finding vast graveyards with lots of stones lying around there ... all showing this torture tool ...

I guess it is okay to post this in here , it is about palaeontology too (i hate opening new threads)

The remains of an ancient human-like creature are said by scientists to come from the oldest pre-human species yet discovered.

Ardipithecus ramidus, or “Ardi” for short is not the long-sought missing link, the ancestor that paleontologists say humans and apes have in common, but it offers new insights into how we evolved.

Professor Tim White of the Berkeley University of California said: “We can see that, as primitive as this creature is, it has already evolved those special characters indicating that it’s on our side of the family tree and that it is not on the chimpanzee side of the family tree, but it is not the common ancestor.”

“Ardi” lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The most complete skeleton, out of more than 30 found, was female and about four feet tall.

The research team in charge of the project believes this particular ancestor may have existed much further back in time, possibly up to seven or nine million years ago.



link

There even is a Wikipedia page about "Ardi" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus_ramidus