/sci/ - Science & Math

>"how much food a dinosaur ate a day"
use muscle attachment sites on bones to reconstruct where the muscles were and their approximate size. use muscle mass estimates to determine total body mass. infer metabolic rate from bone histology (bone in warm-blooded animals is spongier and differently structured than that of cold-blooded ones). check all this against rates from birds, which are extant dinosaurs. determine total caloric needs per day. divide by energy density of inferred diet. QED
>"how long was their life-span"
cut a cross section through the femur of a large individual, one that you figure is about as big as its species got. count the number of annual growth rings. compare to bone microstructure of birds (extant dinosaurs) and crocodilians (closest living relatives of dinosaurs) to verify. QED

>t. paleofag

Walking With Dinosaurs is a good mix of fun and accuracy.

>ctrl+f
>"bakker"
>1 result
>last author on a presentation about Dimetrodon
they missed out desu senpai

>>8933880
>Potential salary?
Meh unless you do micropaleontology or biostratigraphy.
>Potential career opportunities?
Strictly academia (university or museum work) unless you're doing micropaleo or biostrat, in which case you can make lods of emone by working for an oil company.
>What were the classes like?
A 50/50 mixture of sedimentary geo and evolutionary bio. There aren't usually separate classes or departments for paleo; you'll usually be in the geo department, though sometimes you'll be in the bio department instead, and it's not unheard of for vertebrate paleontologists to end up with the medical/veterinary people due to the emphasis on vert comparative anatomy.
Don't do it for the money unless you want to spend your career looking at thin sections to identify biozones.

holy shit OP I don't even study vertebrates and it took me about 0.5 s to recognize that as a sagittal section through a spinal column, with the centra at the top, the neural spines at the bottom, and the neural canal at center.
vertebrae have a very distinctive shape in most tetrapods. have you never eaten bone-in chicken before or something?

>>8780709
currently in Keksas, off to Misery in the fall
career options for paleontology are pretty much petroleum industry (micropaleontology, biostratigraphy, facies analysis) or academia. museums aren't a huge sector, and funding is tight for a lot of them these days; my plan is to do a couple post-doc positions (gotta get the doctorate first tho) and then hopefully find a tenure-track professorship at a university somewhere.
gonna be one of those ivory tower librul academics that ignorant people are always complaining about.

>>8685961
paleofag back again.
please note that in my previous post I did NOT agree with you. you're claiming that a lack of change can be an example of evolution, but you're confusing evolution with selection.
evolution BY DEFINITION involves change.

but here, you want a testable hypothesis? I'll give you the classic evo bio one.
H0: there were no rabbits in the Precambrian

Paleofag here.

>Is it as awesome as it looks?
only if you have a high tolerance for monotony. the electrifying moments of "HOLY SHIT LOOK WHAT I FOUND WEATHERING OUT OF A HILLSIDE" are few, and interspersed between eons of prospecting (tramping over hillsides and through roadcuts looking for stuff) and fossil preparation (scraping rock carefully away from the specimen).

>Will I get to dig up artifacts and Dinosaur bones?
as long as you're interested in fieldwork. remember, the best places to find large fossils tend to be badlands areas, since the high rates of erosion means there's constantly stuff coming to the surface. if you're not much of a sc/out/, it might be rough.
alternatively, if you're doing invert, you can just cruise around sedimentary hill country and look for a place where a roadcut has exposed interesting strata, and collect stuff that way. makes things a lot easier, since you're collecting within 50m of a paved road instead of basically going camping.

>Is it a respected science?
I guess? ecologists and evolutionary biologists rely on our work, and micropaleontology (looking at pollen, plankton, graptolites, etc.) is super useful for biostratigraphy (using the presence or absence of short-lived species to constrain the age of sediments) and that's important to sedimentologists and also petroleum geologists. there's currently a big demand in the oil industry for young micropaleontologists, but bear in mind that micropaleo is the most boring and mind-numbing sort of paleo.

bump! with not exactly a dinosaur!

paleo
because the past is another world, and some things that once lived on this planet are stranger than any ayylmaos we can imagine/get probed by.

thanks for the responses guise

>>8487563
I tried them first...and they sent me back a missive in broken English asking me to sign an NDA before they'd sell me any dye. nope.bmp, I can't have those kinds of restrictions if I ever want to publish my results.

>>8488612
the problem is I absolutely need something that absorbs UV. the plan requires that I illuminate the specimen only in UV (using a UV-pass filter) and photograph only in visible (using a regular old camera) so that I'm only seeing the fluorescence pattern.

>>8488233
>>8488631
I hope you guise are actually just trolling.

>>8475747
that's some good shit
>No tribes, cultures or countries in the world ever discovered a dinosaur bone before the mid-1800s
except that the Chinese have been digging up theropod fossils ("dragons' teeth") for use in medicine since antiquity.
I actually owned a copy of that "make your own dinosaur out of chicken bones" book when I was little, though. Collected the skeletons of a few chickens, let them sit around smelling creepy, never got past the first steps of construction though.

>>8475953
>The law of original horizontality.
CLINOFORMS

because I am a paleontologist, and the past is a different planet

>pros
paleontology is fucking cool as shit
heavy drinking is socially accepted among geoscientists
>cons
no jobs outside academia

microfossils are neat, they're good for biostratigraphy.
paleontology is rewarding if you like fossils (it's the mutt's nuts in my opinion) but you also have to like a certain amount of tedium. if you like it, go for it; the relation to biostratigraphy means that forams in particular will be useful if you want to get a job in industry.

(I'm a paleo grad student doing a thesis on trilobite morphometrics, so I am forever doomed to academia, which is where I want to be anyway.)

paleofag here.
you might enjoy "Digging Dinosaurs" by John Horner, which is about his discovery of Maiasaura and its nests.
for something more general...well, for the planetary geology aspect of things, "How to Build a Habitable Planet" by Langmuir and Broecker is pretty much a must-read. it's a little technical, but it's got what you need to know to have a decent understanding of earth history.

>>7908784
DUR yeah, forgot about spindles. tyvm, have a pic

Hey OP. There is an explanation for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle

Basically, as an outside observer, you must treat a black hole as though everything within it is actually on the event horizon (or very near it). You can see this also in the entropy equation S = kA (for some constant k) which says that the entropy is exactly proportional to the surface area.

>>7397414
>implying anyone on the math and science board of an indonesian drag-racing imageboard wouldn't just pick up the doritos and eat them

Come here discuss, y'all bio/med fags.