During the 2021 United Nations (UN) convention, a friendly dinosaur named Frankie came to visit to warn world leaders that "going extinct is a bad thing," reminding them to save humanity instead of spending billions of public funds on fossil fuel subsidies. Although that was only a promotional video, paleontologist Phil Manning said that studying dinosaur fossils could help address the current global crisis that might send humanity to extinction.
The leading paleontologist from Manchester University highlights that high technology can be used to analyze dinosaur fossils so humans can learn how to live more sustainably and prevent a disaster that might erase humans from the world permanently.
High-Tech Analysis on Dinosaur Fossils Could Tell Humans How to Live Sustainably, Deal With Current Climate Change
What Could Fossils Tell Humanity?
According to Lumen Learning, fossils could be preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms. They could range in age from 10,000 to 3.5 billion years old and vary in size from microscopic, such as single-celled bacteria, to gigantic ones, like trees or dinosaurs.
Geologists from the 19th century found that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata, which suggests that Earth has its own geological timescale. These fossils are important evidence of how long life has existed on the planet because they show how different life forms were compared to modern organisms.
Experts have seen portions of an organism from the past being fossilized, such as body fossils or the bones and exoskeletons, trace fossils from feces and footprints, and chemofossils of biochemical signals in the hope of finding more information about them.
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How Can Modern Technology Help Address Modern-Day Global Crisis?
Today, paleontologists could tell the age of fossils using radiometric dating to categorize and identify their evolutionary relationships with other organisms. As Smithsonian Magazine reported, the modern study of fossils is driven by cutting-edge imaging, 3D modeling, and virtual reconstruction and dissection to advance humanity's knowledge about ancient animals and other organisms.
They aid in the high-tech analysis of fossils without physically removing them from surrounding rock and saving scientists months or years of meticulous work. The virtual bones could result in easy sharing of information to be studied.
According to Engineering and Technology website, Manning believes that high-tech analysis of dinosaur fossils can help quantify how living things interact with their environment. If scientists could reverse-engineer enough information from these fossil records, they could devise more sustainable solutions for current problems.
He noted that if scientists could create technologies that can analyze fossils, then it is also possible to create technologies that can be used to get data from inhomogeneous material. Manning believes more useful information is hidden away in dinosaur fossils that could inspire future manufacturing materials.
He added that other prehistoric giants could have also left useful traces in the fossil record that provides insights into how to design better crash-resistant vehicles based on their body shape and dynamics. Manning also wonders whether studying prehistoric creatures with superior immune systems could help to enhance immune responses to pathogens someday.
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