It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours.
Is just staggering. I'm old(ish), and not in the frantic startup-race culture that's sometimes pervasive here, but still find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.
Speaking of interesting dinosaur names, my other favorite has got to be the Atlascopcosaurus [1], named after Swedish industry tooling company Atlas Copco [2] who sponsored the particular dig (in 1984) when it was found with equipment.
I've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?
It normally isn't that hard. The rock and fossil parts look very different. Go to anyplace where you are allowed to take fossil rocks and do it yourself. It isn't hard to visually see where the rock (limestone ends and the fossil starts. Any 3rd grader can do a reasonable job of separating rock from fossil. There are parks like that all over - most fossils are just another clam (or similar sea creature) of the same type experts have seen millions (billions?) of and so there is nothing interesting left to discover.
Note, do not let the above take away the work experts do. While a 8 year old can do it, those are the easy cases, and a few "hammer slips" don't matter. There is a level of detail that trained hands can do better. There are many types of rocks that can hold fossils, and not all are easy as limestone to work with (limestone is the majority though).
a) That's why they are a specialist. They are trained in the techniques to differentiate the fossil structure from the surrounding matrix (to the best of their ability). One of the biggest differences is texture; bone is very porous relative to most rock. Under a microscope that difference is much more apparent. You can also lick it because the porous texture of fossil sticks to your tongue more than the surrounding rock, but I doubt he did that.
b) Thats also why it took 7000 hours to do. It's really fucking hard, and he wanted to get it as right as possible. That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.
Props also to the Canadian miners with the sharpness of vision and presence of mind to spot the dinosaur and stop digging:
Despite the pace of operations, one particular shovel operator, Shawn Funk, happened to notice something after taking a big chunk out of the cliff. It was thanks to him and several people within Suncor that operations stopped in that area and the Royal Tyrrell was notified.
To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with every detail of its skin, until you know its features better than your own. For millions of year, it was encased in cold stone, as a fairy tale princess enclosed in a cold room, that you would be preparing for its first night in the world.
I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).
"l find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight."
Frankly, this feels like my career right now :D (i.e. kinda senior in an individual contributor role without a daily team collaboratin as such, which means I don't have to run around doing standups, but have gazillion lines of code to maintain and not much time for greenfield development).
> [I] find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.
Honestly, this seems like a refreshingly honest take on life. Pounding rocks like a convict, is where its at! No?
This fossil is at the Royal Tyrrell Museum[0] in Drumheller, Southern Alberta, Canada.
It is by far the best dinossaur museum in the world and also has a fine exhibition on the Burgess Shale, one the best fossil sites in the world for the Cambrian Revolution.
The only other claim to fame for the town of Drumheller is the band Nickelback was formed close by. But that's something most Canadians don't like to talk about.
I came across this online shop somehow a few years ago, and thought it would be hilarious to order from the museum shop of a museum I’ve never even been to, and in a country I haven’t been to either at that.
Not sure where I have those dinosaur T-shirts now but I wore them every now and then for a few years at least :) The T-Rex Skeleton T-shirt being my favourite among the ones I bought from there.
It looks like a cool place but they don't seem to list which dinosaurs they have on display. I was lucky enough to see an amargasaurus skeleton on exhibit in North America and I'd still like to make it to Australia some time to check out their triceratops (https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/20/world/horridus-triceratops-sk...).
> I failed to find a face in the original article.
The second image in the original Ars Technica article shows the side view of its head/face very clearly. According to the caption: its head is still partly enclosed in the concretion it was found in — which IMO gives it the appearance of having its head resting on a rock.
After looking at that, and the third image — an artist's rendition of how it might have looked when alive — the first image should make more sense: its snout is at the front of the image, the bulges of both its eye sockets are clearly visible slightly further back, and the creature looks like it is laying down (and has been somewhat flattened) facing towards the camera, looking slightly to the right of the photographer.
That doesn’t sound like high praise! The quality of the CGI on that show leads me to deduce they were short-changed rather badly given the reported production costs.
For further context: "dinosaurs" covers a time range MUCH longer than the time since they went extinct, i.e. enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve.
There was a large variety. An extremely large variety. As much as we are understandably excited about feathers being a thing that we didn't realize earlier, in 100+ million years a lot of things evolve. They didn't all have feathers.
> enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve.
I know what you're trying to say, but every living thing today, from the mammals to the fungus among us, have spent the same amount of time evolving, dating back to the first life, or at least the first life encoded for reproduction. Except for the birds, the dinosaurs quit early.
Whales evolved from small land mammals since about 50 million years (half the time since dinosaurs) (it took them more like 20 million, but I'm being generous because whales still exist).
100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.
> 100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.
during that period of time, the ancestors of every living thing on earth was also mutating and naturally selecting.
during the entire time the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the mammals and/or their ancestors were also evolving and saving up genetic endowment for being the fittest in every eventuality; sadly, the dinosaurs bet on the wrong ... horses.
The big famous ones got toasted, but one[1] of the small specie survived. A few decades ago, we realized that birds are the descendant of dinosaurs. (Or "birds are dinosaurs" if you prefer that classification.)
[1] One specie or a few species? I'm really curious about the current most popular hypothesis.
Regardless of whether this specific dinosaur is thought to have feathers or not, I was wondering if feathers would survive the fossilization in the first place? Is there anything intrinsic to feathers that would make them different in that regard, then, say, the skin (which apparently is relatively well preserved)?
Feathers have in fact "survived" fossilization, notably those attached to several whole-body archaeopteryx fossils (scare quotes around "survive" because the original material is gone, it is only the shape which survives)
Under very special preservation circumstances, feathers to fossilize. You can see some examples of dinosaur fossils in this Wikipedia article. If you search you can also find lots of bird feature fossils (avian dinosaurs).
> “We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Henderson.
Surely this is nonsense.
You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilised body!
I mean, if I drown and my dead body comes to rest deeper than 50 meters, and then several trillion of years later my fossilised body is uncovered with glauconite all over it, you would be wrong to deduce that I swam 50 metres under the sea.
> But Brown and his colleagues discovered something completely unexpected: Borealopelta’s coloring may have helped keep it camouflaged in its environment. The team found evidence that the animal used countershading, meaning that the coloration of its body was darker on the top and tapering into a lighter underbelly.
Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilised creature? The creature itself is gone - its just stone. You can no more do this, than tell the colour of a man's eyes from his footprint.
> > “We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Henderson.
> Surely this is nonsense.
It is not, though the problem here seems to be that you have badly misread it.
> You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilized body!
Probably not, but this isn’t saying anything about the depths that a living creature swam, but the depths to which the corpse of a land-walking creature sank.
The three paragraphs before the one you quoted about how far it went (after death, not in life), with some marked ellisions for brevity:
A land-based megaherbivore preserved in an ancient seabed is not as uncommon as one might think. […] Scientists suspect its carcass may have been carried from a river to the sea in a flooding event; it may have bobbed at the surface upside-down for a few days before sinking into the ocean depths.
It would have been kept at the surface by what’s referred to as “bloat-and-float,” as the buildup of postmortem gasses would keep it buoyant. Modeling done by Henderson indicates its heavy armor would have rolled it onto its back, a position he suspects may have prevented ocean predators from scavenging its carcass.
Once the gases that kept it floating were expelled, Borealopelta sank to the ocean floor, landing on its back.
> Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilized creature?
“One way to determine an organism’s coloration has been to examine the structure of fossilized melanosomes under the microscope. Melanosomes are small storage sacs within cells that store pigment. Two main flavors of pigments are found in animal tissues called eumelanin and pheomelanin.[…] Classically, scientists have examined the microscopic structure to distinguish between eumelanosomes and pheomelanosomes. However, these structures are often difficult to distinguish microscopically and mineralized microbes can often be mistaken for these organelles. […]
“The genius of Wogelius and his collaborators was to study the chemistry of eumelanin and pheomelanin from modern surviving organisms and then apply what they found to ancient samples. It turns out that each form of melanin has a distinctive associated element – copper for eumelanin and zinc for pheomelanin. X-ray beams can be bounced off the fossil melanosomes, and the way they are reflected depends on the different elements of these pigments. The exact distribution of eumelanin and pheomelanin can be mapped onto a fossil’s structure, providing something like a ‘paint for numbers’ for the fossils! This technique has already been used to paint a picture of an extinct red mouse that lived 3 million years ago. Now investigators hope to use the technique to go even further back in time to capture pictures of the earliest organisms to roam the planet.”
The only other mention of a face in the article is that that its face was preserved. Is your objection to the “looking into its face” posture, or the notion of it having a face in the first place, or something else?
This bit:
It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours.
Is just staggering. I'm old(ish), and not in the frantic startup-race culture that's sometimes pervasive here, but still find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.
Speaking of interesting dinosaur names, my other favorite has got to be the Atlascopcosaurus [1], named after Swedish industry tooling company Atlas Copco [2] who sponsored the particular dig (in 1984) when it was found with equipment.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlascopcosaurus
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Copco
I've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?
It normally isn't that hard. The rock and fossil parts look very different. Go to anyplace where you are allowed to take fossil rocks and do it yourself. It isn't hard to visually see where the rock (limestone ends and the fossil starts. Any 3rd grader can do a reasonable job of separating rock from fossil. There are parks like that all over - most fossils are just another clam (or similar sea creature) of the same type experts have seen millions (billions?) of and so there is nothing interesting left to discover.
Note, do not let the above take away the work experts do. While a 8 year old can do it, those are the easy cases, and a few "hammer slips" don't matter. There is a level of detail that trained hands can do better. There are many types of rocks that can hold fossils, and not all are easy as limestone to work with (limestone is the majority though).
> so there is nothing interesting left to discover
Not true (see OP!), but the odds of finding something interesting are very small.
a) That's why they are a specialist. They are trained in the techniques to differentiate the fossil structure from the surrounding matrix (to the best of their ability). One of the biggest differences is texture; bone is very porous relative to most rock. Under a microscope that difference is much more apparent. You can also lick it because the porous texture of fossil sticks to your tongue more than the surrounding rock, but I doubt he did that.
b) Thats also why it took 7000 hours to do. It's really fucking hard, and he wanted to get it as right as possible. That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.
> That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.
And licking it, it seems :)
How many licks to be licked to perfection ? :p
Props also to the Canadian miners with the sharpness of vision and presence of mind to spot the dinosaur and stop digging:
Despite the pace of operations, one particular shovel operator, Shawn Funk, happened to notice something after taking a big chunk out of the cliff. It was thanks to him and several people within Suncor that operations stopped in that area and the Royal Tyrrell was notified.
I feel like I’d take that job in a heartbeat if it paid similar to SW engineering
To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with every detail of its skin, until you know its features better than your own. For millions of year, it was encased in cold stone, as a fairy tale princess enclosed in a cold room, that you would be preparing for its first night in the world.
I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).
While I entirely agree with the gist of your comment, if the process of "unclothing my first love" took 7,000 hours, I might have to reconsider.
"l find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight."
Frankly, this feels like my career right now :D (i.e. kinda senior in an individual contributor role without a daily team collaboratin as such, which means I don't have to run around doing standups, but have gazillion lines of code to maintain and not much time for greenfield development).
> [I] find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.
Honestly, this seems like a refreshingly honest take on life. Pounding rocks like a convict, is where its at! No?
I guess he discovered himself the specimen bit by bit while doing it, which makes the job not boring.
This fossil is at the Royal Tyrrell Museum[0] in Drumheller, Southern Alberta, Canada.
It is by far the best dinossaur museum in the world and also has a fine exhibition on the Burgess Shale, one the best fossil sites in the world for the Cambrian Revolution.
The only other claim to fame for the town of Drumheller is the band Nickelback was formed close by. But that's something most Canadians don't like to talk about.
[0] https://tyrrellmuseum.com/
They also have an online shop, with some pretty cool dinosaur t-shirts.
https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2
I came across this online shop somehow a few years ago, and thought it would be hilarious to order from the museum shop of a museum I’ve never even been to, and in a country I haven’t been to either at that.
Not sure where I have those dinosaur T-shirts now but I wore them every now and then for a few years at least :) The T-Rex Skeleton T-shirt being my favourite among the ones I bought from there.
https://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/collections/category-2/pro...
If you type into Google “why does everyone hate” it will autosuggest “nickelback”.
I watched a doco once on why everyone hates them. It was interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music.
> I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3rXdeOvhNE
Sorry.
A few more Drumheller facts:
Drumheller was one of the filming locations for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
The Star Trek museum originally located in Vulcan, Alberta is now in Drumheller.
Drumheller is up there on ideal family road trip spots to take your kids. I remember enjoying it a lot as a child.
Head-Smashed-in-Buffalo Jump is nearby too and kind of a hidden gem. [1]
[1] http://headsmashedin.ca/
It looks like a cool place but they don't seem to list which dinosaurs they have on display. I was lucky enough to see an amargasaurus skeleton on exhibit in North America and I'd still like to make it to Australia some time to check out their triceratops (https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/20/world/horridus-triceratops-sk...).
I remember seeing this in a Nat Geo article back in 2017. More pictures available here:
http://www.natgeo.com/nodosaur
The National Geographic journalist left a few interesting comments on HN a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913
This is pay walled. Where else I can see it's more and clear pictures. I failed to find a face in the original article.
> I failed to find a face in the original article.
The second image in the original Ars Technica article shows the side view of its head/face very clearly. According to the caption: its head is still partly enclosed in the concretion it was found in — which IMO gives it the appearance of having its head resting on a rock.
After looking at that, and the third image — an artist's rendition of how it might have looked when alive — the first image should make more sense: its snout is at the front of the image, the bulges of both its eye sockets are clearly visible slightly further back, and the creature looks like it is laying down (and has been somewhat flattened) facing towards the camera, looking slightly to the right of the photographer.
HTH.
Link to the header image from article, as far as I can tell since I'm on mobile:
https://i.natgeofe.com/n/e5966d6a-e93c-4f3d-839f-a228f34fdb3...
Holy smokes this looks like it’s straight out of House of the Dragon.
That doesn’t sound like high praise! The quality of the CGI on that show leads me to deduce they were short-changed rather badly given the reported production costs.
Were they ? They do have quite a lot of "dragon footage"...
Ask and ye shall receive.
JS-free archive link:
https://archive.today/NrUsT
<3
set your VPN to France to bypass the paywall
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clea...
clear cookies > refresh works :)
Absolutely incredible the level of detail in that fossil
Where are the feathers?!? Looks just like a dragon.
From what I understand, it was more the Therapods that are thought to have had feathers.
This is an ankylosaur which was a heavily armored dinosaur.
For further context: "dinosaurs" covers a time range MUCH longer than the time since they went extinct, i.e. enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve.
There was a large variety. An extremely large variety. As much as we are understandably excited about feathers being a thing that we didn't realize earlier, in 100+ million years a lot of things evolve. They didn't all have feathers.
> enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve.
I know what you're trying to say, but every living thing today, from the mammals to the fungus among us, have spent the same amount of time evolving, dating back to the first life, or at least the first life encoded for reproduction. Except for the birds, the dinosaurs quit early.
Whales evolved from small land mammals since about 50 million years (half the time since dinosaurs) (it took them more like 20 million, but I'm being generous because whales still exist).
100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.
> 100 million years is an extremely long time. A lot happens in that amount of time.
during that period of time, the ancestors of every living thing on earth was also mutating and naturally selecting.
during the entire time the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the mammals and/or their ancestors were also evolving and saving up genetic endowment for being the fittest in every eventuality; sadly, the dinosaurs bet on the wrong ... horses.
The big famous ones got toasted, but one[1] of the small specie survived. A few decades ago, we realized that birds are the descendant of dinosaurs. (Or "birds are dinosaurs" if you prefer that classification.)
[1] One specie or a few species? I'm really curious about the current most popular hypothesis.
Technically yes, but in practice I think the victims and survivors of extinction events might beg to differ
Considering natural selection is rarely wasteful at the species level, must've been some nasty predators to evolve that much armor.
Regardless of whether this specific dinosaur is thought to have feathers or not, I was wondering if feathers would survive the fossilization in the first place? Is there anything intrinsic to feathers that would make them different in that regard, then, say, the skin (which apparently is relatively well preserved)?
Feathers have in fact "survived" fossilization, notably those attached to several whole-body archaeopteryx fossils (scare quotes around "survive" because the original material is gone, it is only the shape which survives)
Under very special preservation circumstances, feathers to fossilize. You can see some examples of dinosaur fossils in this Wikipedia article. If you search you can also find lots of bird feature fossils (avian dinosaurs).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur
this article is from The NY Times and I am only linking to it because the first photo in that article is an amazing fossil of a feather. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/science/dinosaur-feather-...
I feel that award goes to the dracorex "dragon king" skull:
https://dino.fandom.com/wiki/Dracorex/Gallery?file=National-...
Dragons usually wore more jewelry
Dinosaurs and the prehistoric era are absolutely fascinating to me. I wonder if there’s a way for a programmer to branch into that world.
So basically dinosaurs (at least this one) DO look shrink wrapped?
I wouldn't read too much into that, hairless cats and plucked birds look very different from their fully dressed versions.
I resemble that remark!
> “We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Henderson.
Surely this is nonsense.
You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilised body!
I mean, if I drown and my dead body comes to rest deeper than 50 meters, and then several trillion of years later my fossilised body is uncovered with glauconite all over it, you would be wrong to deduce that I swam 50 metres under the sea.
> But Brown and his colleagues discovered something completely unexpected: Borealopelta’s coloring may have helped keep it camouflaged in its environment. The team found evidence that the animal used countershading, meaning that the coloration of its body was darker on the top and tapering into a lighter underbelly.
Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilised creature? The creature itself is gone - its just stone. You can no more do this, than tell the colour of a man's eyes from his footprint.
> > “We can see it went in water deeper than 50 meters because it was preserved with a particular mineral called glauconite, which is a green phosphate mineral. And it only forms in cooler temperatures in water deeper than 50 meters,” explained Henderson.
> Surely this is nonsense.
It is not, though the problem here seems to be that you have badly misread it.
> You cannot tell the depths that a living creature swam, from the mineral deposits on its fossilized body!
Probably not, but this isn’t saying anything about the depths that a living creature swam, but the depths to which the corpse of a land-walking creature sank.
The three paragraphs before the one you quoted about how far it went (after death, not in life), with some marked ellisions for brevity:
A land-based megaherbivore preserved in an ancient seabed is not as uncommon as one might think. […] Scientists suspect its carcass may have been carried from a river to the sea in a flooding event; it may have bobbed at the surface upside-down for a few days before sinking into the ocean depths.
It would have been kept at the surface by what’s referred to as “bloat-and-float,” as the buildup of postmortem gasses would keep it buoyant. Modeling done by Henderson indicates its heavy armor would have rolled it onto its back, a position he suspects may have prevented ocean predators from scavenging its carcass.
Once the gases that kept it floating were expelled, Borealopelta sank to the ocean floor, landing on its back.
> Oh please. How is it possible to deduce the colouring of a fossilized creature?
“One way to determine an organism’s coloration has been to examine the structure of fossilized melanosomes under the microscope. Melanosomes are small storage sacs within cells that store pigment. Two main flavors of pigments are found in animal tissues called eumelanin and pheomelanin.[…] Classically, scientists have examined the microscopic structure to distinguish between eumelanosomes and pheomelanosomes. However, these structures are often difficult to distinguish microscopically and mineralized microbes can often be mistaken for these organelles. […]
“The genius of Wogelius and his collaborators was to study the chemistry of eumelanin and pheomelanin from modern surviving organisms and then apply what they found to ancient samples. It turns out that each form of melanin has a distinctive associated element – copper for eumelanin and zinc for pheomelanin. X-ray beams can be bounced off the fossil melanosomes, and the way they are reflected depends on the different elements of these pigments. The exact distribution of eumelanin and pheomelanin can be mapped onto a fossil’s structure, providing something like a ‘paint for numbers’ for the fossils! This technique has already been used to paint a picture of an extinct red mouse that lived 3 million years ago. Now investigators hope to use the technique to go even further back in time to capture pictures of the earliest organisms to roam the planet.”
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/color-dinosaur-actua...
I did misread - thank you for the correction.
For what it's worth, I didn't like reading this article. Something about it seems wrong.
About the subject or the writing style? I thought it was an interesting article, especially for ars
About the writing style, for example talking about looking a dinosaur in its "face". It is jarring and I didn't like reading it.
The only other mention of a face in the article is that that its face was preserved. Is your objection to the “looking into its face” posture, or the notion of it having a face in the first place, or something else?
Some languages besides English have distinct terms for a human face vs. an animal face. Is that what you're referring to?
Why? Animals have faces too.
Yes ok I see your point. I didn't find it deal breaking but I understand how something like that could be