The Mini Dinosaurs from the Harz Mountains 60
FiReaNGeL writes "When unusually small dinosaur fossils were found in a quarry on the northern edge of the Harz Mountains in 1998, it was initially assumed that these were the remains of a group of young dinosaurs. This was a fallacy, as the Bonn palaeontologist, Dr. Martin Sander, recently discovered. At a maximum estimated weight of one tonne, they were only a fiftieth the weight of their closest relatives, the brachiosaurs, and thus by far the smallest of the giant dinosaurs which have ever been found."
Small Giants (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Small Giants (Score:5, Funny)
's a bit like being the most civilized monkey in the zoo...
Re:Small Giants (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Small Giants (Score:1, Offtopic)
Or an insightful comment on slashdot.
Re:Small Giants (Score:2)
Re:Small Giants (Score:3, Funny)
Go for the eyes, Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!"
Re:Small Giants (Score:2)
Mini-people (Score:2)
This all fits in with the discovery which the scientific journal Nature reported on last year: on Flores also the 18,000-year-old bones of a 'dwarf' human. This 'Flores hobbit' was only one metre tall.
This may fit in elegantly, but last I heard (maybe even on slashdot) this discovery was now believed to be a normal human with a disease of some sort.
Re:Mini-people (Score:3, Informative)
It's still disputed. Wikipedia has a short summary of the 2 opinions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#A_n ew_species.3F [wikipedia.org]
The thing I don't understand about the hypothesis that the fossil is actually a diseased human, is that they found partial fossils of 8 other individuals, which I assume were consistent with the near-complete fossil being
Re:Mini-people (Score:2)
Granted it's not nessecarily the same defect, but the idea that a small group of people is somehow immune to disease strikes me as silly.
Re:Mini-people (Score:1)
I wouldn't mind seeing a reference on a claim like that. I call BS. See http://www.discover.com/issues/may-92/features/aqu estionofsize42/ [discover.com]
In summary, it is believed to have been a slow evolutionary process. Some of the factors they believe select a smaller size are: temperature (pygmy populations have evolved almost exclusively around the equator - being smaller makes it easi
Re:Mini-people (Score:2)
You should read the article you cited, where it begins to discuss the endocrinological differences between pygmies and average people, their extremely low birth size, their lack of an adolescent growth spurt, and so on. It seems your article actually supports me. Actually, essentially every reference I find which is newer than 1980 supports me. Mercedes de Onis is res
Re:Mini-people (Score:2)
First, as pointed out in the other reply to your post, it's not unlikely in small populations for this to occur. Second, neither
Re:Mini-people (Score:1)
This is not the average run-of-the-mill genetic deformity. People with severe microcephaly are extremely unlikely to survive beyond childhood without care. As children, they are unable to feed. As they begin to grow, they experience seizures, fail to develop motor skills, are unable to learn, and can become paralysed. (Basically, the brain continues to try and grow as normal, but the head doesn't). I can ha
Re:Mini-people (Score:2)
This is not the average run-of-the-mill genetic deformity. People with severe microcephaly are extremely unlikely to survive beyond childhood without care. As children, they are unable to feed. As they begin to grow, they experience seizures, fail to develop motor skills, are unable to learn, and can become paralysed. (Basically, the brain continues to try and grow as normal, but the head doesn't). I can handle a microcephalic child surviving to adulthood even tens of thousands of years ago. I don't buy th
Re:Mini-people (Score:1)
It's hotly contested. (Score:5, Informative)
The debate has likely intensified even further with recent genetic studies of Neanderthals, using mtDNA extracted from the teeth. This is because the mtDNA shows vastly greater variation in early Neanderthal genetic makeup than had ever been expected. So much so that all prior studies are now considered grossly inadequate, as they only examined a hundred or so base pairs, considering the rest to be essentially identical. If genetic diversity in early hominids in general was as great as genetic diversity in early Neanderthals is believed to have been, then the probability of there having been a natural experiment in hobbits is considerably greater.
There is, however, one outstanding problem that has NOT been resolved. Dwarfism on islands is common with reptiles. Reptiles do NOT do islands well. However, mammals on islands tend towards giantism - Amblyrhiza Inundata (a giant rat the size of a grizzly) being an excellent example. Birds, although descended from reptiles, also seem to do well on islands - the Moa (a flightless bird that was 13 feet tall) and the Haast Eagle (the largest eagle that ever lived, with a wingspan of 14 feet), both from New Zealand, being good examples. This is because mammals scale well and therefore lose very little by being large, even when resources are scarce. Reptiles don't scale so well, so there is a loss of efficiency in being large. No big deal on a large enough land mass, but on an island, it's a major problem.
Humans, because they are potentially much better at cooperating, are capable of planning and storing, and are able to access a much wider range of foods over a much greater range of environments, should (based on knowledge of other island-based mammals) scale up on islands extremely well, and should only shrink where conflict is greatest, which would typically be a continent. It's hard to say if this is the case, as humans have always been amazingly mobile, but my gut feeling is that you'll find more very tall people on or around islands than you will in the middle of continents. This creates a problem for the hobbits, though. Mammals shrink when being able to run is a far greater survival trait than being able to gather more. On an island, there is very little to run from and almost nowhere to run to. There should, therefore, be no advantage to them being that small and therefore no reason for such a trait to be selected.
I think it likely that the hobbits are indeed a new branch of hominids, but without a good, solid explanation for why they would be small, the theory will never be acceptable to any evolutionary scientist worth a damn, no matter how much they want it to be true, simply because it runs counter to what we know about mammals on islands. Answering that one question will probably quell a lot of the more skeptical scientists, too. A mechanism that ties things together and presents a coherent picture is more acceptable than an extrapolation, no matter how many fossils it is from.
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:4, Interesting)
Could it be that we just don't have enough fossil or other records to even prove our current theories as fact. Sure everything points to it being this or that but what if we are missing a very large portion of the story.
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_mammoths [wikipedia.org]
Clearly there are multiple factors at work that affect dwarfism or gigantism. It's not possible to predict the effects of living on an island for any particular kind of animal without a lot more information. This other information might include, size of island, nutritional requirements, habitat, population dynamics, behavior
Not just on Wrangel island, either (Score:2)
Nova did a nice little show about the Wrangel ones, if I remember right.
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:1, Interesting)
It is amazing how many different opinions there are on the same facts:-)
reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5021214.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
I would point out an obvious flaw in his logic, though - in order for something to be under development for 800,000 years (as opposed to merely being used for 800,000 years), you should see signs of progress. That's obvious, right? Well, typically what constitutes progress with a stone tool is the abi
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
Ok, ok, I'll be serious for a second - it depends on what you define "advanced" as being relative to. If you're talking in the context of stone tools, then your lowest level is a lump of rock picked up from the ground, and your highest level is the finest the stone will fracture repeatably combined with the best possible shaping for the purpose of the tool. If you picture this as an X-Y graph, where (0,0) is the lump of rock and the ideal is (M,N), draw two diagon
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:2)
Re:It's hotly contested. (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, it's worth noting that all five of Earth's five biggest reptiles are in the setting that you suggest that they
Canarysaurus (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Canarysaurus (Score:1)
But didn't you mean Canarydactyl?
Re:Canarysaurus (Score:2)
Re:Canarysaurus (Score:1)
Dinosaur Racing (Score:2, Funny)
Oxymoron (love this word!) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oxymoron (love this word!) (Score:2)
You do realize that everyone knew that's what they meant, right, Mr. Rosetta Stone?
Re:Oxymoron (love this word!) (Score:1)
Thank you. I always strive to excel.
Miniatures (Score:1)
Mammoths did try a smaller form (Score:2)
Populations of wooly mammoths did indeed evolve into the "pygmy" mammoth [nps.gov].
Nova did a nice program on the questions about the little hairy elephants a few years ago, I think concentrating on the ones on Wrangel.
Re:Mammoths did try a smaller form (Score:1)
Re:Miniatures (Score:2)
Might I suggest you go shopping for a tapir? [wikipedia.org]
Re:Miniatures (Score:1)
Re:Miniatures (Score:2)
ObUnits (Score:4, Funny)
From TFA: "Their cousins, by contrast, were up to 45 metres long and weighed in at 80 tonnes - as much as a small town of over 1,000 inhabitants."
I don't understand. How many Volkswagen Beetles is that?
'Conspiracy' theory (Score:2, Funny)
Re:'Conspiracy' theory (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:'Conspiracy' theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:'Conspiracy' theory (Score:2)
What I think this means, is that the modern environment is more hostile to huge plant growth and large herbivores than the eras of the d
Re:'Conspiracy' theory (Score:2)
Re:'Conspiracy' theory (Score:1)
BTW, this is the real flaw with all time travel movies. If you bopped back to the age of the dinosours, you'd probably be dead within minutes as you might as well have jumped to a different planet. And dinosours's cloned back to like today would have to live in big bubb
Picture of Mini Dinosaur (Score:2)
Re:Picture of Mini Dinosaur (Score:2)
hurm... (Score:2)
Did they note the suspicious remains of a Father-son-daughter "routine expedition" nearby? Any three fingered lizard men? Strange pylon with crysatls inside?
Smallest sauropod, most likely (Score:3, Insightful)