I wonder what the bones weighed prior to being fossilized. Also wondering if this is a 'typical' specimen or not.
That said, the college having a program to collect fossils for undergrads to work on really rocks. (no pun intended) There really isn't anything that can replace hands on experience for these kinds of things.
Agreed, seeing those pics of the kids standing next to the fossil warmed my heart. We need more hands on science.
One thing I always thought would be cool would be to take say the 100 most famous experiments -- from Galileo rolling balls down an incline to Hertz measuring the strength of an electromagnetic fields based on the number of footsteps from the center, and do them in an afterschool program or homeschool program. Lots of kids would enroll, and it would be quite a bit of fun.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Interesting because since the time when this was actually news in late-August 2020 and USA Today linked the press release, the college has moved to a new domain and for whatever reason didn't keep the old site up or redirect.
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.
For the interested: according to a quick search, the head of an elephant weighs 400 kg (881 lbs), and among African elephants adult males weigh between 1800 (3968 lbs) and 6300 kg (13 889 lbs). They are heavy!
