Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Find Soft Tissue in T-Rex Fossil
douglips writes "Reuters is running a story about a shocking development in paleontology: A T-Rex thigh bone fossil was reluctantly broken to fit in a transport helicopter, and inside soft tissue was found. It appears to include blood vessels and bone cells. Scientists hope to isolate proteins, and perhaps even DNA."
This is not the first identification of soft protein laden tissue that has been extracted from dinosaur tissue as Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University has extracted these tissues from other tissues as well, so there is a precedent.
Of course getting actual DNA from these tissues will be a long shot due to its fragile nature, but protein sequence may prove very informative in letting us define exactly where genetic lineages have gone over evolution.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
meaty goodness
in my professional paleontological opinion (not), it needs a nice marinade
fre up the BBQ, lets see what T Rex tastes like
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>
>does it taste like chicken?
Considering that birds are the distant descendants of dinosaurs, and considering that the article someone else referred to describes traces of proteins from 70M-year-old eggs as bearing "strong similarities to proteins from chicken eggs.", I'd bet good money that the answer is probably "yes".
The dino in the NewScientist article was a herbivore, and T. Rex was either a carnivore or carrion-eater; so maybe it'll taste more like eagle or vulture.
Personally, I've never eaten eagle or vulture. Anyone know wha-yeah, I figured as much. Chicken.
"This is Unix. I know this!"
I've nothing to say here...
Modes of fossil preservation:
Soft part preservation - Soft tissues are preserved only under exceptional conditions. Examples include preservation of Siberian Mammoths (freezing in permafrost), Pleistocene cave faunas and older mummified remains (dessication), and insects and small animals preserved in lithified tree sap (amber). Soft parts can also be preserved after being replaced by minerals.
Original hard parts - Resistant materials such as calcium, silica, and calcium phosphate are sometimes preserved as original hard parts in shells, bones, and teeth.
Recrystallized hard parts - It is common, however, for original hard parts to be altered during diagenesis and after lithification. Unstable minerals such as aragonite will recrystallize to a more stable form such as calcite. Mineral crystals within an organism's hard parts my regrow to become larger and consolidated. Often recrystallization destroys fine, internal detail within a fossil.
Carbonization - Organic-laden hard parts and soft parts can be preserved as a thin film of organic carbon. This occurs when the organic material is preserved undecayed through burial. As heat increases throughout burial the volitile components of the organic material (N, O, H, and S) are driven off leaving a thin film of black carbon behind.
Replacement - Chemical reactions that occur during diagenesis can result in the molecule by molecule replacement of mineral for mineral or mineral for organic tissue. Replacement can often preserve exquisite detail in fossils.
Silicification - replacement of calcite by silica.
Pyritization - replacement of calcite or soft tissues with pyrite
Phosphatization - replacement of low phosphate apatite with high phosphate apatite.
Permineralization - Porous organic structures such as wood and bone are often preserved by the mineral infilling of the pore spaces. A common way of 'petrifying' wood and dinosaur bone.
Source
-----------
It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues. I googled this phenomenon and there seems to be a rather broad definition for "soft tissue". Soft Tissue, it appears, can be preserved in many ways (see above). I'm curious as to how this tissue survived micro-organisms, mineralization/calcification, carbonization, or simply, or even dehydration. How was it able to remain soft enough to be squeezed?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
There is a rather better write-up of this awesome story on MNSBC, including some rather shocking pictures. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
In this case, the acidity is unlikely to be a factor, but the totally anaerobic conditions may be. It is possible that any bacteria in the soft tissue simply didn't have what they needed in order to consume the organic material, and therefore didn't. A slight variant on the situation with peat, but essentially the same idea.
A second option - less likely, but possible - would be a variant on the way fresh produce is kept fresh today. Modern food isn't always kept with preservatives. Rather, the packaging company uses a medium blast from a radioactive caesium isotope. This kills off all of the bacteria present.
Radioactive materials certainly occur naturally, and there are indeed cases of naturally-occuring nuclear reactors. It is entirely within the realms of possibility that natural radioactivity kept the inside of the bones sterilized, so that organic decay could not take place.
The odds of that being the case are slim, but not quite none. However, it raises questions on what may be found in areas where such preservation techniques may actually have occured.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Soft dinosaur tissue would be interesting if that's what it really is, but here's a quote from today's Science journal:
"Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, cautions
that looks can deceive: Nucleated protozoan cells have been found in
225-million-year-old amber, but geochemical tests revealed that the
nuclei had been replaced with resin compounds. Even the resilience of
the vessels may be deceptive. Flexible fossils of colonial marine
organisms called graptolites have been recovered from
440-million-year-old rocks, but the original material--likely
collagen--had not survived."
The breakdown you are referring to happens when the cells split to form new cells. If the cells aren't multiplying, the DNA's not breaking down.
No, you've read something into my statement that I did not intend. And somehow gotten an "Insightful" mod for it - Kudos!
I refer to plain, ordinary entropy-obeying molecular breakdown. DNA slowly decays into less complex molecules over time, after the organism dies. IIRC, somewhere around 0.1% per millenium - Which sounds small but over the course of 150M years really adds up, making it pretty lucky to find evem a few thousand base pairs intact at a time.