Very well preserved ice age cave bear found in Siberia

Querius

Oh and Jerry and Seversky . . . how does finding supposedly 75 million year old DNA in cartilage affect your beliefs on the age of the duckbill dinosaurs? Here's physical evidence. Science. -Q Querius

Reprint . . .

Evidence for Unsuccessful Evolutionary Auto-Domestication of Ursus Spelaeus by Neanderthal Humans While definitive scientific understanding is currently incomplete, recent discoveries of cave bear remains (Ursus spelaeus) comprising the complete skeletons of an adult male, adult female, and a juvenile Ursus along with those of a pre-pubescent Neanderthal female (Homo neanderthalensis) seem to indicate the termination of a nascent evolutionary domestic mutualism. Near the tiny French village of Qui se Soucie, a cave that the locals laconically refer to as la Grotte was investigated. After removing several tons of contemporary detritus, researchers were able to disinter the previously described remains, along with a scattering of Neanderthal artifacts, both decorative and utilitarian. Ursine hibernation was indicated by three pear-shaped depressions in the cave floor. The remains of what appears to have been a wood fire was located within a half meter of the large end of the largest depression Evidence of an episode of vigorous activity in the cave included numerous claw marks on the cave walls as well as carbon deposits from one or more burning torches. Additional evidence of the Ursus as an opportunistic omnivore includes scarring and tooth indentations on the Neanderthal bones. The Neanderthal female, nicknamed "Goldilocks" by the researchers, apparently disturbed the hibernation of the bears by building a fire for additional warmth way too close to where the large, male Ursus was hibernating, and, as one researcher described it, "setting his caboose on fire." "Obviously, the domestication scenario rapidly destabilized into a fatal asymmetric relationship," noted another researcher.

Apparently, millions of years don't make that much difference. Regarding newly discovered evidence of dinosaur DNA . . . https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/03/duckbill-dna/ There should be absolutely no DNA present in 75 million-year old dinosaur cartilage! Or any cartilage. Here's another example of "rabbit in the Precambrian" falsifying evidence as put forward by J.B.S. Haldane. -Q Querius

. Are you suggesting people should take heed of physical evidence Seversky? You don't. Upright BiPed

Very Well Preserved Ice Age Cave Bear Found In Siberia

Great for paleontologists, maybe not so good for the rest of us

But behind the story there is a deeper and concerning one – wait, isn’t “melting permafrost” an oxymoron? Isn’t permafrost supposed to be permanent? Not exactly. The technical definition of permafrost is any ground that is frozen for at least two years straight. Less than that and it is considered seasonally frozen. But much of the permafrost in the world has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. The oldest ice is in Antarctica, believed to be 1.5 million years old.

Melting permafrost, however, is not just another marker for global warming, it is especially concerning because it may also magnify global warming by being a positive feedback mechanism. Permafrost freezes in place, over hundreds of thousands of years, a tremendous amount of carbon in the form of organic material. This carbon is taken out of circulation, literally frozen in cold storage. As the permafrost melts it releases this previously sequestered carbon. There is also a lot of methane frozen in the ice, and that gets released too. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, but also has a shorter life in the atmosphere. It is estimated that as much as 92 billion tons of carbon could be released from melting permafrost between now and 2100. This is 20% of all the CO2 released since the industrial revolution, or about three years of total global emissions at the current rate. Melting ice is a positive feedback loop in another way. Snow and ice are highly reflective, so they reflect a lot of solar energy back into space. When ice melts and is replaced by ground, that ground reflects less light and absorbs more of the energy – again increasing warming. Positive climate feedback loops are especially concerning for obvious reasons. Melting permafrost is concerning for yet another reason – the ice that is melting is tens of thousands of years old. While this is a boon to paleontology, this also means that this ice took tens of thousands of years to form. As permafrost formed over hundreds of thousands of years it trapped carbon from organic material. As the permafrost melts that carbon gets released, but there is no way to reverse this process on the time scale of human civilization. It would take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to recapture that carbon back into permafrost. Permafrost traps more carbon than exists currently in the atmosphere. The process of melting permafrost is therefore considered irreversible. This is one of the feedback loops that worries climate scientists – if we get to 2 C warming that will cause feedbacks that get us to 3 C, and so on until we reach a new equilibrium point, which may be somewhere around 6 C warming over pre-industrial levels. This may take hundreds of years, but at some point it becomes unstoppable. We then have to adapt to a much warmer world, with uninhabitable regions due to heat, more droughts, and sea levels about a hundred feet higher than they are today. So melting permafrost is a critical marker for global warming. We need to take it seriously. Sure, paleontologists will make the best of it, but it’s not a good trade-off. Also, diseases are melting out of the permafrost, not just mammals. That is very much a side phenomenon, but the last thing we need is new infectious agents being released in the world.

Seversky

I believe Dinosaurs and the Ice age are umpteen million years apart. jerry

The time period would easily include Neanderthals, which would be even more interesting. Otzi was much later, within the period of written history. polistra

They already have dinosaur soft tissue . . . kairosfocus