Australia's first complete plesiosaur fossil discovered in outback Queensland | Hacker News Reader

Australia's first complete plesiosaur fossil discovered in outback Queensland

abc.net.au

75 pointsadrian_mrd20 comments

I remember seeing an opalised plesiosaur in a gallery as a child visiting White Cliffs. I always found that amazing, to find a combination of an already remarkable ancient fossil and then add opal.

https://www.google.com/search?q=opalised+plesiosaur&source=l...

Opalised ammonites also: https://www.google.com/search?q=opalised+ammonite+&tbm=isch

Complete is perhaps strong. At least one of every limb, but the entire torso, neck and head. Its complete head neck and body being contracted. It might be described as "substantially complete" or "mostly complete" or "sufficiently complete".

It's the MVP of complete.

That's nothing. Wait until they find out it's copywrited. /s

Only tangentially linked - but blows me away how few fossil dinosaurs have ever been found in new Zealand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dinosaurs_and_other_...

probably a combination of geographical isolation, late human discovery, small geo-/archaeologist population and recent volcanism displacing dino treasure

Fun fact, plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs. Neither are pterosaurs. The mesozoic was full of independent lineages that a single asteroid did away with. We are lucky to have the few that survived.

Did you learn that recently because you have young children into dinosaurs or did you already know that information? Curious because Im now so deep into dinosaur era fauna (which is why i know that fun fact) and space knowledge as a function of kids, and its great!

I have had young children, but have also been one.

Besides the pterosaurs, I recently learned that proper dinosaurs appear to have evolved flight in at least four separate lineages, independently. The feathers came first. Doubt anybody will ever know why only Aves survived. I have seen a claim that the only birds that survived were flightless, and had to evolve flight all over again. (I might have misunderstood something.)

Sauropods are to me the most mystifying of the proper dinosaurs, for purely mechanical reasons. So many unanswered questions.

svpow.com

> I recently learned that proper dinosaurs appear to have evolved flight in at least four separate lineages, independently.

Birds… and what else?

They have only Latin names, and are not widely known. Jing-mai O'Connor seems to know about them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK2lZaw_eMc

After some quick research online: Plesiosaurs and pterosaurs are not dinosaurs mainly due to the configuration of their skeletons. It seems that dinosaurs have their limbs under the body while plesiosaurs and pterosaurs have their limbs stick out from the side like crocodiles and turtles.

Technically, they are not dinosaurs because they are not descended from the common ancestor of all dinosaurs, which had limbs so configured.

Some "allied" lineages had them, too, omitted from Dinosauria proper for technical reasons. Some isolates developed it independently, mammals notably among them. Probably some dinosaurs developed a sprawling gait "secondarily". Biology is a messy business.

it still blows my mind that fossilized bones can remain intact for tens of millions of years. I know it's mostly minerals at that point. Still, it blows my mind that anything is able to retain its shape over tens of millions of years.

It is a highly unlikely process that is the result of a chain of events, not just at the "creation" end but also at the "discovery" end: that the bones are close enough to the surface to be detected, but haven't been eroded away yet. The fossils we have are from hundreds of millions of years, we only got to get the most common species which lived in the places that were good for fossilization, the fraction of a fraction of all animals that lived.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-are-fossils-formed.html

Are unfossilized bones themselves not mostly minerals as well?

Eventually plesiosaurs will become mythical. The fossils will be dug up and lost, the records fragmentary or unreadable.

They are aquatic so most of the fossils will be located under the oceans and seas. We can only find these ones because the area was once a shallow sea that has since drained due to the sea level falling.

New fossils surface all the time. Plesiosaur fossils have been getting exposed, here and there, and then eroded to dust, for many tens of millions of years, and will continue for longer.

Eventually, unless prevented, the sun will engulf Earth.

So, it can't be preserved digitally, like shown in star wars prequel.

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