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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 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
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.
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"
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.
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?
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