You guys, I’m so sorry I’ve been falling down on the dinosaur posting! Once again I’ve been sitting on some really interesting news!
- Don Davis/NASA
- Ka-BLAM!
So! You know how the prevailing theory of dinosaur extinction is that they were wiped out by the effects of a massive meteor that hit the earth about 65 million years ago? WELL:
A fossilized sauropod bone, dated by a team of Canadian and U.S. scientists to 64.8 million years ago, appears likely to force a serious rethinking of the demise of dinosaurs, which were supposed to have been wiped out in a catastrophic meteorite strike no later than 65.5 million years ago — 700,000 years before the death of the giant, vegetarian beast that left its femur behind in present-day New Mexico.
You can read all about it here, here, here and here.
In local dinosaur news, all my fellow dino-nerds might be interested in attending this event at the Burke:
For the second year in a row, the Burke Museum is bringing one of the world’s most renowned experts on dinosaur paleontology to Seattle for a free public lecture… Dr. Philip Currie is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on the growth and variation of extinct reptiles, the anatomy and relationships of carnivorous dinosaurs, and the origin of birds.
The event is Friday, February 25 at 7 pm at Kane Hall 130 on the UW campus. The event is free, but you must pre-register due to space constraints.
I wonder how far the sauropod got after losing it’s leg?
I thought the dinosaurs went extinct as a result of god’s flood 6000 years ago?
No, no, Urgutha, you’ve got it all wrong. The bones were put there by Satan to test our faith in God’s Holy Word. Sheesh, get with the program.
What’s 700,000 years between friends?
@3 No, no, now it’s a plot by the Jews. Or is it the libruls? I get my paranoia confused.
I’ve read this is over-hyped media crud. The paleontologists are not signing off on this. I’l try to find a link but googling dinosaurs and uranium dating produces a creationistpocalypse. Pray for the soul I don’t have.
This is some next-level bullshit. The Chicxulub impact didn’t kill off the dinosaurs all at once. Rather, the catastrophic climatic effects killed off almost all of them within a few years to decades, leaving greatly reduced populations that dwindled down over several thousand years due to the loss of their habitat and reduced genetic diversity. So it’s possible that a few stragglers did make it to when this bone was deposited.
A more likely explanation, however, would be the Zombie effect, in which the bone would have been fossilized much earlier, eroded out of the matrix, and redeposited.
Thanks Venomlash. And sorry Slog, my Googling has failed. But I really did read something online somewhere trashing this dude’s claim. The basic point was that Heaman’s uranium dating method is unreliable. I think Venomlash’s Zombie effect was mentioned somewhere too.
Fassett’s “new findings … appear to support Fassett’s theory”.
Hmmm.
Awww, I was having all these neat fantasies about zombie dinosaurs… Also, was it a sauropod or a hadrosaur? There seems to be some disagreement in the sources.
@7 so you’re saying the Zombies killed off the Dinosaurs?
Here’s a thought. Instead of ONE bone that has turned out an anomalous dating, how about we get hundreds of them before we call all the established science off?
Looking at Wikipedia for Uranium – Lead dating, one finds (if one can drag oneself away from zombie taxon, Lazarus toxon, Elvis taxon and the Elvis Presley phenomenon…) U-Pb dating has a routine precision in the range 0.1 – 1%. 700,000 years over 65 million requires a precision of 0.01%. It may be this new technique provides that, but one sample without any independant correlation for the new technique (that happens to support the tester’s theory) makes the result questionable IMO. But we shall see.
According to http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/EE-Ura… , “Heaman and colleagues say their direct dating method can preclude the reworking process that relative chronology entails.”