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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."
just curious.
I'm sorry, but why did they have to put it inside a transport helicoptor? Couldn't they just have attached a tether or something?
[o]_O
I'm slightly skeptical. The article talks about soft tissue, but none of the scientists even try to explain how soft tissue could have survived for seventy million years?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
instead of mindlessly breaking open rare fossils looking for soft tissue as suggested by Dr. Schweitzer?
Or evidence that fossilization and preservation of soft tissues works a bit differently than presumed. The article says that this kind of fossilization has been seen before in eggs and feathers, but not true soft tissue, so it is not unprecidented or completely unknown.
Remember, there is still lots of other geological evidence that the earth is WAY more than 6000 years old. The find is interesting, but you certainly can't jump to that conclusion from it.
Of course, using logic isn't the strong suit of the ID\Young Earth\Creationism set anyway, so I fully predict those guys will show up here in force with a bunch of "I told you so" posts, mostly with out actually reading TFA.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Sorry, but the brontoburger already exists!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
What intrests me the most here is if this can help prove the T-rex in fact are mutch younger then science now belive. Perhaps earth realy isn't that old, anyway?
Birds too, I believe, cannot see things that do not move
False. How else would birds find their water bowl, or their perch? Snakes cannot see things that move, birds obviously can.
Nice to see that the mormons are still pushing stupidity.
the BIBLE talks about dinosaurs. they are specifically mentioned in the early books of the bible.
i suggest you so called believers actually read your holy books...
Cripes, christianity must have the largest ratio of lunatics to normals than any other religion...
Many Christians make radical muslims look pretty stable.... Most all muslims obey their belief's, most christians do so when it's convienent.
really. Then how in the hell do they find the bird feeder? Or the seeds therein?
While you may have heard that the human eye needs to move to "update" what you see, you heard an ignorant spewing nonsense. Your eyes sense light, and your brain interprets the pattern. When you "see" a car, it is a pattern of light and color that lets your brain recognize it as a car. Whether the car is moving or not is immaterial. Whether your eyes are moving or not is of limited importance (read: none).
Some frogs will apparently ignore flies that are motionless, and this has led to a belief that they cannot "see" the fly unless it is moving. What is more likely is the frog does not want to eat a dead fly, and only identifies moving flies as "food."
How else would birds find their water bowl, or their perch?
By moving relative to the perch/bowl/etc.
The whole "seeing things that move/don't move" is kind of difficult to say for any species. Really, they look at brain activity, and some species of animals exhibit more interest in things that move than in things that don't move. Most likely all the animals see everything perfectly fine, but only pay attention to the things that are moving: food, mates, enemies.
Well, considering i've never had the hankering for an iguana sandwich, i think i'll be passing on the T-Rex ribs. Afterall, it is a Terrible LIZARD, isn't it?
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
We've got a 70 million year evolutionary leg up on the little buggers; I'd be stunned if they could induce a case of the sniffles in a person with AIDS. What'd be more interesting would be if (HUGE IF: I'll take any science by press release with a few pounds of salt. This soft tissue business needs to go through peer review before it's credible to any real extent) any were present we could potentially learn a great deal about viral evolution.
Eventually, they would have a creature that could carry a pure T-Rex embryo.
Kinda shocked that no one else mentioned it yet, but...
The T-Rex, like most dinosaurs and like most modern lizards, laid eggs.
If we could get a viable T-Rex zygote, we could almost certainly implant it in the egg of any larger still-living lizard (monitor?) without much difficulty.
But after this long, even if we found a perfectly preserved T-Rex frozen in ice, it would not have a single viable cell in its body.
As the best possible outside chance for making a living T-Rex, we might manage to get enough overlapping DNA fragments to piece them together, then manually generate a complete genome for the beastie. Allowing for that (IMO, physically possible if not technologically feasible yet) that, we would still need to get a few intact T-Rex mitochondria, which I suspect will not happen for the same reason we won't find a whole viable T-Rex cell - Namely, DNA breaks down at a relatively steady rate, and after 150 million years, you don't have many long runs of it left intact.
Everyone keeps hearing "dinosaur dna" and thinking "cloning". That seems like a bit of a long shot. And I think concentrating on this is overlooking the real value here.
If they find any dinosaur DNA just think of what could be done with that. Mostly what I'm thinking about here is ancestry analysis. Our understanding of the exact way evolutionary processes have behaved contains much that is based on similarity and guesswork. It seems if we could get solid information on what now-living organisms that dinosaurs were related to and to what extent-- or what dinosaurs were related to each other and how, if more soft tissue can be found in other fossils-- it seems this could verify science's understanding of paleobiology (sic?) and the evolutionary tree, or change it, in an unprecedented way. Has anything of this sort-- DNA from living tissue that old-- ever been found before, has there ever been any comparable way we have been able to perform genetic testing on a sample of that age?
This is even aside from what that DNA and any found proteins can tell us about how dinosaurs looked and behaved...
This is a really big deal.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to *closed* systems. This creationist "argument" was torn apart as soon as it was uttered.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Which re-raises the question of why it is easier to see things that actually are moving.
Years and years of evolution. With humans, movement attracts the immediate attention of the brain and an immediate risk assessment is done. It is a survival tool.
It is also allows a predator (which humans are, also) to isolate moving prey from the static landscape.
I have never heard of the "eye is constantly moving so we can see" theory/idea. Sounds like BS to me. In fact when the eye moves (either in the socket or when the head moves), we are temporarily blind for about 200ms. This is why what we see does not blur when we shift our focus on something else (try it!)
I recommend the O'Reiley book called "Mind Hacks". The authors go into this in much more detail.
"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Easy, its not 70 million years old. That to me is the most obvious answer.
I won't deny that this finding is exciting for creationists, but that's irrelevant to the existence of the tissue itself. The existence of the tissue is a matter of hard science. It will be peer reviewed (if it hasn't already been), and if it's faulty, those faults will be exposed. I expect that it will be scrutinized especially closely because unfossilized tissue does seem unlikely from the prevailing viewpoint. The reviewers will want to be meticulous in their examination of the finding, which is of course only proper.
As it happens, we have a huge source of increasing entropy to drive our tiny localized decreases in entropy: the sun.
Entropy is also an observation, not a fundamental law. We observe that one spot in spacetime has low entropy, and entropy increases as we travel away from that point in time.
If you pull out of your viewpoint embedded in your local perception of spacetime, and look at all of the universe through history more like a single static object, you'd see that there's simply a boundary condition at one point with low entropy, and another boundary condition (possibly at infinity) with high entropy. That's not necessarily all that strange or confusing; certainly it's less confusing than explaining how your "intelligent designer" came about itself.
The typical response: "We're not supposed to understand how the intelligent designer got there!" explains nothing. It's a copout; a dead-end for the intellectually lazy who would rather say that all the answers they need have been conveniently put into a pamphlet for them. That's fine for you. The rest of us will keep working on finding real answers.
At least according to the creationist museum.
This isn't the first instance that soft tissue of a prehistoric animal has been found. There have been many discoveries of frozen mastodons, and even some attempts to clone them, but no successes that I've heard of.
I'm sure cloning/breeding a mastodon is a trivial matter compared to cloning an 70 million year old animal that has no relative species alive today to use as surrogate mothers. So, I'm not expecting to ride on a tethered T-rex at the state fair anytime soon.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
A sad life?
T-Rex survived for millions of years through asteroid impacts, earthquakes, global climate change, flood, drought, disease, and competition for food. By comparison, our H. Sapiens species has been around for only 50,000 years or so and our numbers and technology have expanded during only the last 2,000. Extrapolating our most recent 100 years of history into the future doesn't make our prospects look very good either. Disease, war, and environmental destruction are likely to thin us out quite a bit or even lead to our extinction. At this very moment, millions of scientists and engineers all over the globe are hard at work thinking of new, more effective, ways to kill large numbers of us. Whose life is sadder, T-rex or H-Sapiens?
Then how do birds land on rocks, branches, or statues? If they can't see it, how do they avoid crashing into it instead of landing gracefully?
I think the truth is that every creature can see inanimate objects. Otherwise they would stumble with every footfall. Perhaps more accurate is to say that when scanning for something that moves, most creatures watch for changes in a scene. Even humans do this to a lesser degree. We only stop to look when a quick scan doesn't reveal what we were looking for.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Don't blame the engineers and the scientists. The universe was always out there for us to discover. Blame the politicians and the propagandists who are able to quite successfully able to persuade millions to forget the consequences of their actions.
...I just can't decide whether that deserves a "+1 Funny" or a "+1 Insightful"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing