Posts: 12133
Threads: 125
Joined: January 11, 2010
Reputation:
45
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 29, 2023 at 11:10 pm
(This post was last modified: May 29, 2023 at 11:14 pm by Rev. Rye.)
Jurassic Park, fortunately or not, would be functionally impossible IRL. It turns out that the half-life of DNA is only 521 years. So, after a minimum of 65 million years, there wouldn’t be anything usable left.
To check and see how long it could potentially last, I found out that the Australian lungfish has 43 billion base pairs in its genome (the largest one known). Log2(43 billion)=35.324 half-lives * 521 years per half-life=18,403.804 years.
So, yes, even if a mosquito somehow managed to suck that lungfish’s blood and then got preserved in amber, that DNA would only have lasted 18,403 years. And that’s not even “with holes in the genome that can be filled with frog DNA”, that’s ANY DNA.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
Posts: 32976
Threads: 1412
Joined: March 15, 2013
Reputation:
152
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 29, 2023 at 11:15 pm
Well, yeah, but now with your fact-checking you're just ruining the fun of fiction.
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
Posts: 12133
Threads: 125
Joined: January 11, 2010
Reputation:
45
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 29, 2023 at 11:27 pm
(This post was last modified: May 29, 2023 at 11:29 pm by Rev. Rye.)
(May 29, 2023 at 11:15 pm)Tomato Wrote: Well, yeah, but now with your fact-checking you're just ruining the fun of fiction.
True. Hell, and even if they did get the DNA for the Velociraptors, they’d end up looking like giant pheasants. Imagine being hunted by something that looks like this.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
Posts: 19789
Threads: 57
Joined: September 24, 2010
Reputation:
85
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 30, 2023 at 4:41 am
Velociraptor were the size of medium sized dogs, not the 6 foot tall killers depicted in Jurassic park. The theory that their toe claws let them disembowel much larger pray with slashing kicks is not supported by bio-mechanical modeling, which suggest their claws lack the sharpness to cut through dermis and would get stick in victim’s skin and muscles instead, leaving the velociraptor in an awkward position vs the now very angry putative victim. In other words the notion that velociraptors would pose mortal danger to human sized mammals should we ever meet them is not well supported by paleontology .
Posts: 12133
Threads: 125
Joined: January 11, 2010
Reputation:
45
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 30, 2023 at 4:54 am
Which is why I used the Utahraptor in my photo which is inexplicably no longer working.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
Posts: 2753
Threads: 4
Joined: September 21, 2018
Reputation:
33
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 30, 2023 at 5:18 am
(This post was last modified: May 30, 2023 at 5:19 am by Deesse23.)
Tepui are tabletop mountains in the border region of Venezuela and Guayana.
They tower above the rain forest with 90° steep walls of up to 700m/2000ft, the highest one reaches up to 2800m/10.000ft total, the biggest one covers an area of 650km^2.
The climate is entirely different from the rain forest with average temperatures of only 10C. On top of those mountains there are endemic species of flora and fauna that can not be found elswhere on the world.
Of many of those Tepui we only have maps from radar equipped copters or from space, because they are engulfed by clouds most of the time. Man (who was on the moon already) has not set foot on many of them until now. Some of them have major caves, which are not explored yet and giant sinkholes that are up to 600m deep.
Cetero censeo religionem delendam esse
Posts: 19789
Threads: 57
Joined: September 24, 2010
Reputation:
85
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 30, 2023 at 11:58 am
(This post was last modified: May 30, 2023 at 12:24 pm by Anomalocaris.)
Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World is based on the notion that tepuis’ cliffs had separated the flat tops from the ecosystems all around them since Mesozoic era, so isolated remnant populations of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals continue to thrive on top of the tepuis.
In fact, The tops of the tepuis really are the erosional remnants of the originally continuous land surface during the Mesozoic when South America was part of the supercontinent Pangea.
Doyle guessed right, but he could not have known it for sure given the state of geological science at the time.
Posts: 46077
Threads: 538
Joined: July 24, 2013
Reputation:
109
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 30, 2023 at 1:44 pm
Julie Newmar is still alive.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
Posts: 2753
Threads: 4
Joined: September 21, 2018
Reputation:
33
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?
May 30, 2023 at 1:48 pm
(May 30, 2023 at 1:44 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Julie Newmar is still alive.
Boru
So is Robert Wagner
Cetero censeo religionem delendam esse
Posts: 19789
Threads: 57
Joined: September 24, 2010
Reputation:
85
RE: What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday
May 30, 2023 at 2:26 pm
(May 30, 2023 at 1:44 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Julie Newmar is still alive.
Boru
She apparently owned a few patents. Although I wouldn’t say her patents put her in the same league as Heady Lamarr.
|