[HN Gopher] 3000-pound triceratops skull excavated in South Dako...
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3000-pound triceratops skull excavated in South Dakota (2020)
Author : SquibblesRedux
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-05-11 04:12 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.usatoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.usatoday.com)
| clort wrote:
| I'm guessing it is 3k pounds now it has been turned into stone,
| rather than when the triceratops wore it on the end of its neck..
| jjjbokma wrote:
| Yes, see my estimate for another skull:
| http://johnbokma.com/blog/2016/08/20/verifying-the-weight-of...
| clort wrote:
| do you have an estimate for the original skull weight? That
| link just cross references the mineral weight..
|
| edit, wondering if dinosaur skulls had cavities like bird
| skulls to keep the weight down..
| krick wrote:
| That's easy to calculate. We don't know which mineral it
| was this time, but taking an estimate of 3.7 g/cm3 from his
| post,
|
| Taking an estimate of 3.7 g/cm3 (but we don't know which
| mineral was in this case), and assuming something like 1.5
| for bone density (which is at the higher side, but I'm
| allowing that these protective plates may be a lot denser
| than the skull bones themselves, no idea if it's correct
| though) that would be like 1200 lbs.
| pegasus wrote:
| They did indeed. They developed the cavities to deal with
| the huge size they attained, but that tech came in handy
| millions of years later when they/some reprofiled to
| flight.
| pattisapu wrote:
| "Although the coronavirus pandemic derailed plans and typical
| course credit could not be offered, students signed up for the
| excursion anyway."
|
| Kudos to these volunteers!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| press release from dig team at Westminister, MO college
| https://news.wcmo.edu/campus-life/westminster-college-underg...
| dvaun wrote:
| This contains more information than the link in the OP.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Not only that but the one linked in the OP is 404
| [deleted]
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I wonder why the editor chose 3k-pound instead of 1.5 ton, or
| 3,000 lb. Never seen that before.
|
| Edit: OP changed the title, though the original title was within
| the HN character limit.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| My guess is # of headline chars is a precious commodity and
| pounds are a more common unit if weight than tons?
| codetrotter wrote:
| > pounds are a more common unit if weight than tons?
|
| Are they though?
| spfzero wrote:
| There's two thousand of them for every ton, so yes! :-)
| krick wrote:
| That's... pretty good. Cannot even object.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| I did a quick google trends comparison and pound certainly
| has a lot more references than ton. Another way would be to
| use a text corpora...
| jordan801 wrote:
| Perhaps because there is a metric ton and a US ton.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| although given the context the units should be specified in
| stones...
| dvh wrote:
| To woo women:
| https://liturgicalcredo.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/robin-wi...
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| OP (me) copy-pasted the title exactly from the source page.
| Assuming the title at time of copy-paste was "3,000", I don't
| know how it became 3k. Is there an automatic search replace
| done by the HN submission process?
| dcminter wrote:
| There is - on one occasion a submission of mine had the
| capitalization automatically changed (incorrectly as it
| happens). I don't know if this is what happened to you, but
| it seems likely.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| The editor chose "3,000-pound." Whoever submitted this to HN
| abbreviated that to "3k-pound."
| [deleted]
| diplodocusaur wrote:
| I was hoping for full pics of the dino but got a picture of
| Britain's Queen Elizabeth II
| disgrunt wrote:
| Close enough.
| davedunkin wrote:
| A fossil's a fossil.
| mring33621 wrote:
| Yeah, I was annoyed at the same thing. 14 pictures in Ads, but
| only 1 crappy picture of the subject of the article.
|
| Also... No course credit? Robbery!
| bosswipe wrote:
| A Google Image search for "triceratops Grand River National
| Grassland" turned up a bunch of images.
| tyingq wrote:
| The article on the college's website has a few pictures:
| https://news.wcmo.edu/campus-life/westminster-college-underg...
| switch007 wrote:
| The odds of there being a photo in these kind of articles seems
| exactly inversely proportional to how cool the subject is.
| alok99 wrote:
| Is it that heavy because it petrified? I wonder how much it
| would've weighed as just bone.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Yes, a fossilized (not petrified) object has a density similar
| to stone, typically around 2.7 kg/m^3. Bones, like most living
| tissues, have a density close to 1. So to a first
| approximation, this would have weighed 1,000 lbs when alive,
| comparable to the head of a modern elephant.
| topher515 wrote:
| You're suggesting that a cubic meter of stone weighs just 3
| kg (6.6 lbs)?
|
| That doesn't sound right.
| krick wrote:
| He obviously meant 3 000 kg. Easy to make a mistake, since
| 3 kg would be 1 liter, which is more common way to think
| about densities.
| athenot wrote:
| 2.7 Kg/dm3
|
| (Just noticed that Unicode U+3379 is the DM CUBED glyph but
| doesn't render on the mac, unlike mm^4, cm^3, km^3)
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(page generated 2021-05-11 23:00 UTC)