
Dinosaur tail discovered trapped in amber (2016) - curtis
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/health/dinosaur-tail-trapped-in-amber-trnd/index.html
======
curtis
The most interesting part to me is that there are feathers trapped inside the
amber:

> _The amber, which weighs 6.5 grams, contains bone fragments and feathers,
> adding to mounting fossil evidence that many dinosaurs sported primitive
> plumage..._

~~~
glauque
Indeed, and a fairly recent discovery among Velociraptors.

> The feathers of the flightless Velociraptor may have been used for display,
> for covering their nests while brooding, or for added speed and thrust when
> running up inclined slopes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor#Feathers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velociraptor#Feathers)

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/317/5845/1721](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/317/5845/1721)

------
DrScump
The paper:

[http://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...](http://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(16\)31193-9)

"A Feathered Dinosaur Tail with Primitive Plumage Trapped in Mid-Cretaceous
Amber"

------
m3kw9
I would go back to the market, pay the man extra and ask him to help trace
where it came from, as there could be more where it came from

~~~
couchand
Well, the article has a photo of the field where it came from, so presumably
something more or less like that has already happened...

~~~
lostlogin
The mining photo looks really grim, and reminds me of the mammoth tusk mining
photos that were linked to from HN a few weeks back.

[https://www.google.co.nz/amp/photofunonline.com/photographer...](https://www.google.co.nz/amp/photofunonline.com/photographer-
joins-illegal-mammoth-tusk-hunt-in-siberia-captures-how-they-get-rich-get-
drunk-and-nearly-die/amp/)

------
lifeisstillgood
it's quite beautiful ... and feathered, definitely feathered :-)

------
Frogolocalypse
Clearly there are feathers. Is it finally settled then? Land-based dinosaurs
probably all, or at least most, had feathers?

~~~
moultano
The assumption right now is that every theropod had feathers of some kind
somewhere. Some of them may have lost them as adults, or only be partially
covered, the skin impression information is somewhat inconsistent. But
generally yes, theropods looked very much like big carnivorous flightless
birds, plumage and all. Velociraptor for instance likely had what today we
would describe as wings.

~~~
krylon
Jurassic Park lied to me! Even though the link between dinosaurs and birds is
mentioned explicitly. :(

Would be interesting to see a remake that used all of the current knowledge
about dinosaurs, what they looked and behaved like.

~~~
bringtheaction
The most recent Jurassic Park movie has a solution to this problem. In it they
say that they had to use genes from amphibians together with the dinosaur
genes in order to create their animals. This way the issue is reconciled.

~~~
krylon
Now that I think of it, they mentioned the amphibian DNA in the first one (and
the book), too, to explain why the dinosaurs were suddenly able to procreate.

Still, a life-size velociraptor ot T-Rex covered in a coat of feathers must be
quite a sight.

~~~
kkylin
I think someone may have posted this already, but in case not:
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t-rex-skin-was-
not...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/t-rex-skin-was-not-covered-
feathers-study-says-180963603/)

"T. Rex Was Likely Covered in Scales, Not Feathers"

What I don't understand is how something the size of T rex doesn't just die
from heat shock whenever it breaks into a sprint. I vaguely recall reading
somewhere that one of the dangers facing beached whales is that they start to
overheat rapidly. Did big dinosaurs just live in cooler environments? Do they
have better ways to dissipate heat? Did they like dipping in lakes and ponds?
I'm sure someone would have asked these questions already, but no idea what
current thinking in the field is...

~~~
saget
Whales have a lot of fat (and I'm assuming other insulating tools) to keep
them warm in cold water, their bodies aren't designed to be beached in warm
air under the sun. Elephants, while not as large as a trex, can survive the
hot African savanna no problem so I feel evolution could handle making a trex
live in moderate temperatures without to much of a problem

~~~
srean
The question, though, is with or without feathers. Elephants have huge head
radiators and no plumage, so there is a point to the article

------
Yuioup
Article is from 2016

~~~
donatj
The article is dated one year ago today. I'm honestly kind of shocked I hadn't
heard about this for an entire year!

------
seandougall
Fascinating! (Also [2016])

------
powmedia
Life will find a way

~~~
HankB99
I wonder if we can get some DNA from it.

~~~
delecti
The half life of DNA is roughly 521 years [1]. The sample was 99 million years
old, so you could expect roughly 3.33347 × 10^-57200 [2] percent of the DNA to
be left. And considering humans have about 7 billion base pairs [3], you could
reasonably expect no real recoverable information to remain.

[1]
[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10/05/rspb.2012.1745)
[2]
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.5%5E(99+million+%2F+...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.5%5E\(99+million+%2F+521\))
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome)

~~~
throwaway613834
In what sense does DNA have a half-life? It can't be radioactivity so is it
seems to be just about molecular disintegration? Which is weird because why
should a stable structure have a half-life?

~~~
anamexis
The introduction of the first citation explains it a little bit:

> DNA has limited chemical stability and decays without the enzymatic repair
> mechanisms of living cells [18]. Following cell death, nucleases start to
> cleave the DNA into fragments [19] and during decomposition, the DNA is
> digested by micro-organisms [18,20]. In determining long-term DNA decay, it
> is believed that hydrolysis of amino groups accelerates the loss of purine
> residues (depurination), resulting in strand cleavage [21,22]. This random
> DNA fragmentation generates a characteristic negative exponential
> correlation between DNA fragment length and number of molecules (figure 1a)
> [23,24,26,27].

~~~
throwaway613834
Thanks! I even clicked on the link and read every sentence that had "half" in
it but didn't see anything... didn't expect it to be somewhere else in the
introduction haha.

~~~
delecti
As a general rule, it's safe to assume every word in the abstract of a paper
is significant.

~~~
throwaway613834
> As a general rule, it's safe to assume every word in the abstract of a paper
> is significant.

...what? The sentence quote above was from the introduction, not the abstract.
Nothing in the abstract answered my question of why a stable structure like
that of DNA should undergo disintegration. (Did you read the abstract
yourself?)

------
em3rgent0rdr
"the specimen, the size of a dried apricot..."

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Don't know why I was downvoted...it is a common pastime on HN to laugh at
these types of comparisons.

~~~
BugsJustFindMe
I didn't do it, but I'm going to guess that it was because your comment gave
absolutely no context or meaningful input, and it therefore seems reasonable
that someone has decided that it adds no value to discussion of the article.

I did downvote this one though, because of the antepenultimate entry in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

