Dueling Dinos

[Vera]

"A legal saga that threatened to upend fossil hunting in dinosaur-rich Montana has drawn to a close, and paleontologists are breathing a sigh of relief.

The Montana Supreme Court this week ruled that fossils are not legally the same as minerals such as gold or copper. Therefore, Montana fossils, including a dramatic specimen of two dinosaurs buried together, belong to people who own the land where they are found, rather than to the owners of the minerals underneath that land.

The four-to-three decision upholds the way U.S. scientists have long approached questions of fossil ownership. It appears to defuse a potentially explosive 2018 ruling by the federal Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that fossils went to the owners of mineral rights.

The outcome is a win for scientists who had warned that tying fossils to mineral rights could make it harder to get permission to excavate and could throw into doubt who owns fossils already on display, says David Polly, an Indiana University paleontologist and past president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The case revolves around an extraordinary trove of dinosaur fossils found on a ranch in remote eastern Montana. Starting in 2006, 1 year after buying the property, Mary Anne and Lige Murray, in collaboration with a private fossil hunter, uncovered major finds including a complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The most unique discovery was a pair of dinosaurs with entwined skeletons, suggesting they could have been locked in combat when they died.

Following the valuable discoveries, Jerry and Robert Severson, two brothers who sold the land to the Murrays, argued they were the partial owners. That’s because they had kept a share of the rights to the minerals under the land. In some states, ownership of oil, gas, and minerals can be separated from the surface land.

A federal district court sided with the Murrays. But an appeals court panel ruled two to one that fossils went with the owners of mineral rights. The full circuit court granted a rehearing and sent the question to the Montana Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the state court’s majority wrote that despite “attempts to conflate ‘fossils’ and ‘minerals,’ the dinosaur fossils found on the Murray property are not minerals under the word’s common and ordinary meaning.”

The attorney for the losing side lamented the decision, saying the court put precious fossils in the same category as common rocks and dirt. “That just seems wrong to me,” attorney Eric Wolff says.

The court’s decision doesn’t apply to other states, but Polly predicted it would carry legal weight if the issue comes up again. “This would undoubtedly be used as an exemplar,” he says.

It could also clear the way for the final sale of the “Dueling Dinosaurs.” The Murrays have an agreement to sell the paired fossils to a U.S.-based museum, Krogh says. The selling price is confidential, he says.

This deal is more good news for scientists, who feared the distinctive fossils would be bought by a private collector, keeping it from the public and researchers, Polly says. “That is wonderful,” he says. “It is a huge relief.”

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Greed sucks.

[Dancefortwo]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

Ecology then, geology now.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

[Minimalist]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

Ecology then, geology now.

Even in the Mesozoic humans did not want to live there and thus fuck things up.

They probably still demanded two senators, though.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

Didn't Dr. Dingbat find ... six ... T.rex in one spot a few years ago in the Alberta area?

[Dancefortwo]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

Wasn't there a huge ice dam that exploded and ripped through that area?  Maybe that was after the dinosaurs.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

Wasn't there a huge ice dam that exploded and ripped through that area?  Maybe that was after the dinosaurs.

No, absolutely not. Total nonsense. (Because of the age, not the concept. )

[Thumpalumpacus]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

Didn't Dr. Dingbat find ... six ... T.rex in one spot a few years ago in the Alberta area?

Rich fish finds too, as one might imagine.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Wasn't there a huge ice dam that exploded and ripped through that area?  Maybe that was after the dinosaurs.

Yeah, as GS points out, it was at the end of the most recent Ice Age.

[Dancefortwo]

Answering my own post.  I'm thinking of the Missoula Flood from the Ice Age so loooooooong after dinosaurs but it may have buried some dinosaur fossils even more.

[Dancefortwo]

Montana has some amazing dinosaur fossils.  I don't know why, I guess they roamed around that area a lot.  This sounds like a great thing for paleontologists.

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

Didn't Dr. Dingbat find ... six ... T.rex in one spot a few years ago in the Alberta area?

Who's Dr. Dingbat?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

That area of the continent, ranging up into Alberta and down into Colorado, was on the marshy edges of a large, shallow inland sea. Those marshes didn't have much oxygen in them, which worked to preserve the corpses better.

Didn't Dr. Dingbat find ... six ... T.rex in one spot a few years ago in the Alberta area?

Who's Dr. Dingbat?

The one that thinks T.rex was solely a scavenger. Name's on the tip of my tongue. Need to find a mirror.

[Minimalist]

Jack Horner.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Jack Horner.

Yeah, that dumbass.

[brewerb]

The attorney for the losing side lamented the decision, saying the court put precious fossils in the same category as common rocks and dirt. “That just seems wrong to me,” attorney Eric Wolff says.

Aren't a lot of fossils eventually made from common rock?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The attorney for the losing side lamented the decision, saying the court put precious fossils in the same category as common rocks and dirt. “That just seems wrong to me,” attorney Eric Wolff says.

Aren't a lot of fossils eventually made from common rock?

All fossils are made when minerals replace the bones and other parts of a buried animal. Specific minerals do this in a location. The minerals retain the shape of the items they're replacing.

[brewerb]

The attorney for the losing side lamented the decision, saying the court put precious fossils in the same category as common rocks and dirt. “That just seems wrong to me,” attorney Eric Wolff says.

Aren't a lot of fossils eventually made from common rock?

All fossils are made when minerals replace the bones and other parts of a buried animal. Specific minerals do this in a location. The minerals retain the shape of the items they're replacing.

Wiki tells me not all fossils are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Not all fossils are what?

[Dancefortwo]

Not all fossils are what?

I think he meant to say "minerals".

Which brings me to the subject of Mary Schweitzer.  Several years ago she took some dinasaur fossil and disolved in some acid......well, I'll just post from the Smithonian science magazine article.

It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both

Her work was hijacked by Young Earth Creationists claiming, without reading the research paper, that this proves the earth is young because cells could not have survived 65 million years.  Mary begged to differ and insisted that her research was sound and that this dinosaur was still 65 million years old.  Creationists said she was a minion of Satan and called her every name in the book.  She is herself a Christian, how she remains a Christian is beyond me but that's another subject.  Anyway her research was well documented but Creationists aren't reading it because 1) it's too complicated and 2) if they read it and understand it the whole thing tosses Jesus out the window.  

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n...115306469/

adding this from Sciencemag.org.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/...s-her-hunt

Schweitzer's most explosive claim came 2 years later in two papers in Science. In samples from their 68-million-year-old T. rex, Schweitzer and colleagues spotted microstructures commonly seen in modern collagen, such as periodic bands every 65 nanometers, which reflect how the fibers assemble. In another line of evidence, the team found that anticollagen antibodies bound to those purported fibers. Finally, they analyzed those same regions with Harvard University mass spectrometry specialist John Asara, who got the weights of six collagen fragments, and so worked out their amino acid sequences. The sequences resembled those of today's birds, supporting the wealth of fossil evidence that birds descend from extinct dinosaurs.
Others challenged the findings, suggesting that the structures seen under the scope might be bacterial biofilms, and that the mass spectrometry results might reflect contamination with modern bird collagen.
But Schweitzer's team pressed on. In 2009, she, Asara, and colleagues reported in Science that they had isolated protein fragments from a second dinosaur, an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur. Asara's lab identified eight collagen fragments. This time Schweitzer sent samples of fossil extract to an independent lab, which also detected three of the collagen fragments.
Collectively, the sequences showed the purported hadrosaur collagen was more closely related to T. rex and birds than to modern reptiles. "This proves the first [T. rex] study was not a one-hit wonder," Asara said at the time. Two labs also detected the proteins laminin and elastin with antibody tests, although mass spectrometry failed to turn up sequences for these proteins.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It wasn't soft tissue, it was fibrous minerals.

[brewerb]

Not all fossils are what?

Made with minerals, read.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Not all fossils are what?

Made with minerals, read.

But that's wrong.

[brewerb]

Not all fossils are what?

Made with minerals, read.

But that's wrong.

Then go and edit wiki.