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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."
Let the cloning begin!
just curious.
Now we know that when the cloned T-Rex escapes, if you stand perfectly still it won't see you!
hail our new cloned-DNA T-rex overlor-*CHOMP*
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Now this is news. I know we are not gonna get any cool theme parks out of this, but this is pretty cool stuff.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
If I said it once, I've said it a thousand times...
Modern helicopters are just too small!
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.
after all, earth is only 6000 years old and was created in 40 days, unless my sources are wrong
We can check for traces of tar, nicotine and other toxins, and scientists will get to end the extinction debate. Seriously, might this be the biggest news of the decade? Longer?
Looks good for your age..
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
those damn SUVs better watch out. Yeah, who owns the road now %^*@$!
It'll be interesting to see if we can find hominid remains in similar states of preservation, so we can learn more about the layout of our evolutionary tree. Then again, a T-Rex bone is huge, and that may be the only reason it managed to keep anything preserved.
Pfft. All we need to do is a find a girl that knows how to use Unix.
Shit.
"It never got weird enough for me." - HST (RIP)
Anybody got a handy chaos theorist? Anybody? Seriously, I need a chaos theorist, oily hair, glasses, fuzzy math skills, preferably debauched.
Alternatively do any of you know anything about UNIX systems?
"Scientists Find Kleenex Tissue in T-Rex Bone"... and thought "those damn litter pigs"!
Homer: He may be rich, but money can't buy everything!
Marge: Like what?
Homer: . . . A Dinosaur!
I want to be the first 35 year old kid on my block with a T-Rex. Leash laws be damned!
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
Why would a T-Rex be using Kleenex?
Hello?... Is this thing on?
What if they added bits and pieces of DNA to that of other animals, gradually creating a species that is more and more like a T-Rex? Eventually, they would have a creature that could carry a pure T-Rex embryo.
I wonder if this soft tissue will give us some clues about the metabolism of T-Rex, namely will it reveal whether it was warm or cold blooded, or something in between. I must admit this is surprising news.
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
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
WHY did it have to be the DNA of a T-Rex? Why couldn't it have been a nice herbivore, like a stegosaurus, or even better, one of those little chicken-sized dinos?
Now there's going to be running and screaming, and it's all going to be a big huge mess.
Technoli
I'm a little concerned about the possible viruses which may have been dormantly sitting in this soft tissue all along. Who knows what they might be/do?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
article here
>
>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.
Let the cloning begin! ...
Eh.
Mmmm... It -does- taste like chicken. If you can imagine 10,000 year-old chicken getting better with age.
Now if I can just find a 10,000 year-old White Zin to go with it...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
"Paleontologists forced to break the creature's massive thighbone to get it on a helicopter..."
Who was heading this team, Homer Simpson?
I can just see him now:
Homer: "Grrr..."
Lisa: "Dad, it's just too big to fit in there."
Homer: "Nonsense Lisa, daddy will just shove it in....Grrr....here it goes...." *snap* "...DOH!"
Sugapablo
"This is Unix. I know this!"
I've nothing to say here...
Is this proof of a young earth?
Except that they did not mindlessly do that. It was so that they could get it on the helicopter. There is a difference.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
Ignorance of "Time Cube" indicts you stupid and evil. Explain the "Time Cube". Do you like being Stupid? "Our Cube" corners Liars!
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.
First, I think we'll definately see cloned dinosaurs, mammoth, etc within out lives. What I think will surprise people will be the economic pusher for this.
Sure, researchers will pioneer the basic technology, but the people who do the large scale cloning won't be theme park owners, scientists, or preservationists.
They'll be food producers.
We're at the top of the foodchain, and foods like Fugu (deadly blowfish), sushi, and... well, many asian dishes, prove that we're running out of new stuff to eat. There are amazing strides being made by cooks, and there are only so many things people can try before they die of old age, but more and more people are getting adventuresome and want to eat things that nobody else has.
Enter: The brontoburger.
Who here hasn't salivated at the thought of carving into a big old dinosaur steak? Who here can forget the longing eyes they cast on Fred Flintstone's car as it tipped over under the weight of the massive dino-ribs he had just ordered?
Predictions:
1. Herbivores of various types will be bred in captivity for their meat and leather.
2. The rich will beat a path to their doorstep for the exclusivity of eating prehistoric food.
3. In an almost defiant gesture of the universe, the meat will undoubtedly taste like chicken. Dinosaurs are, after all, big ol' birds by most reckoning.
You may laugh now, but when you're cleaning the last bit of Tony Romas Olde Fashioned Allosaurus (like grandpa used to make 'em) Ribs, remember where you heard it first. Or second, or whenever this message drifted across your desk.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Pfft. All we need to do is a find a girl that knows how to use Unix.
No such thing. We'd be lucky to find a chick who can turn on a computer.
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)
You'd have to demonstrate a use. There's a lot of companies who patented huge swathes of the human genome who are having those patents methodically overturned when it was discovered that 1)they didn't know what they were patenting and 2) they had no use for it then, anyway.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
...they broke Marc Bolan apart and found soft tissue inside?
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
...the NRA. They have never looked as attractive as they do today...
The obligitory Matrix Quote
"We're gonna need Guns...Lots of Guns"
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
And even if they can't find all of the DNA, they'd just have to stir in some frog DNA and let the T-Rex fix itself.
FreeSpeech.org
The scientist in the article wants more scientists to start cracking open their own T-rex bones to see if they have soft tissue inside as well. I'm wondering, isn't there a way to tell what's inside *apart* from cracking open precious bones? Ultrasound, or an MRI, maybe?
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
The T-rex could of died out last week and it would have absoulutly nothing to do with how old the earth is. T-rex was around 65 million years or so ago. The earth is 4.6 BILLION. The dating of dinosaurs has nothing to do with the how science determined the age of the earth. Dipshit.
Now just watch.
Now just watch. People will clone Tyrannosaurs, and they'll turn out to be cute-colored, friendly carrion eaters.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Perhaps they can use potassium-40 dating, or some other method to directly measure the age of the soft tissue, rather than the traditional method of estimating age by the surrounding rock.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
is approximately when DNA becomes junk. It doesn't matter whether you can extract DNA or not, because even under ideal conditions DNA degrades so anything you manage to recover will be nonsensical and useless. We will never, repeat never, be able to clone anything as old as T. rex.
Jurasic Park and the idiot that wrote it have a lot to answer for when it comes to my annoyance and stress levels!
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
You were there, were you? Maybe you can explain something to me. How long was the first day? Where did the building materials come from? Doesn't it take crazier faith if you claim the universe spontaneoulsy came into existence and assembled itself in such a way as to have intelligent life, without containing the intelligence in the first place? (i.e. Things getting more organized over time into complex biological systems all by themselves). That flies in the face of the law of entropy, which says basically that stuff left to itself gradually falls apart and becomes more disorganized and more random over time. It takes effort to keep things running.
Try Again.
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.
God creates dinosaur.
God kills dinosaur.
God creates man.
Man kills God.
Man creates dinosaur.
Dinosaur eats man.
Woman inherits the earth.
Analogous to a geek that can turn on a chick
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
First, the parent is not a Troll. Who modded the parent Troll?
But the parent does use some kind of wierd logic.
The logic the parent should use goes something like this...
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Ahh. This just proves that Evolution is BS, and that the earth is not hundreds of millions of years old. It is just a couple of thousand years old. Soft tissue could have lasted that long. In your FACE scientists. The dinosaurs were obviously killed in the crusades because they were dumb animals that didn't believe in Jesus. Duh.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
"It's all Oooh and Ahhh, now, but just wait until the screaming begins later..."
If they clone a T-rex, don't they have to clone Jeff Goldblume, too?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
At least according to the creationist museum.
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."
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
Good idea, but the closes living relative would be a bird. Ostrich egg, perhaps.
Tor
the BIBLE talks about dinosaurs. they are specifically mentioned in the early books of the bible.
Specifically, many Christian creationists believe that tanniyn (translated "dragon"), b@hemowth ("behemoth" or "brachiosaur") and livyathan ("leviathan" or "kronosaur") were Hebrew names for dinosaur-sized creatures, as explained here.
Nice idea, that with the egg, but it will not work. Looks like most organisms require so-called maternal effect genes (Fruit flies do, nematodes do, and if they do, we usually do, too) for proper initial embryonic development. While these genes are usually highly conserved, I doubt whether the Ostrich/Monitor/Your_fav_reptile will have the proper set of maternal effect genes that have enough T-Rex sequence in them left to actually properly satisfy fore and aft (to begin with). And then there's a whole bunch of even more esoteric genetic reasons why this will not work. Don't get me started. If you do, I'll ramble on for several pages.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
here is an article that goes a bit more in depth about the theory.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
"So, I'm not expecting to ride on a tethered T-rex at the state fair anytime soon."
Well, just in case they do get it working, and you want to give the T-rex a treat afterward, remember to keep your palms flat.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
One problem, even if it were feasible to clone a T-Rex (which mostly likely it isn't) there is the tiny fact that dinosaurs at the time lived in a higher oxygenated atmosphere. This made it possible for them to grow as large as they did.
-Steve
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
This is the link to the actual news release. (I study at NC State ;-))
http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/05_03/075. htm
There's nothing wet-blanketish about this. Only Michael Crichton fanboys think that cloning dinosaurs is a remotely plausible scenario, even if we are lucky enough to find intact DNA. The real excitement is the explosion of knowledge about these creatures that can result from such a find. Going from fossilized bones and eggs to actual DNA and cell tissue would represent a quantum leap in our understanding of dinosaurs; it might allow us to answer some questions that were believed to be unanswerable. And mastodons are only barely "prehistoric". They coexisted with humans for thousands of years. Going from mammoth tissue to dinosaur tissue is like going from Galileo's telescope to the Hubble telescope. I can't wait to see what sort of stuff they'll be able to find from this.
C'mon, she's a nerd girl, she automatically gets a bonus for that. She's got nice legs. And archaeological digs tend to be out in the middle of nowhere and last for months and months with no other stimulation...what would you think then? Darn right.
Lab analysis reveals that that the soft tissue was a Chicken McNugget dropped by a site worker eating his lunch.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
What do you mean "is not even interpreted the same in all species"?
mRNA codons (transcribed from DNA) code for the same amino acid almost universally. We only know of 15 exceptions, and these are generally minor single-nucleotide changes like: "AUA" coding for methionine in human mitochondria, not just "AUG". One of the reasons we feel all life evolved from the same cell of sludge in the primordial ooze is things like common amino acid coding.
Even when there is a change, it's the tRNA's job to match codons to amino acids, and the tRNA is transcribed from the DNA.
Unless T-Rex went down a very *VERY* different evolutionary path, his proteins will be coded by the same amino acids which will be coded by the same codons as essentially every lifeform on earth.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I can't. I don't speak Japanese.
...I just can't decide whether that deserves a "+1 Funny" or a "+1 Insightful"
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...Bubbah T. Hatfield, who assisted in loading the large bones into the helicopter, said "shore wuz a bitch gittin that big 'un on the bird. Had tah bust it in half, and I cut muhyself and bled like a stuck pig all over it. Hope duh head bitch ain't pissed or nothin' "
birds have been discovered fossilised contemporaneously with dinosaurs - ... - and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
By the same reasoning, humans live contemporaneously with primates (chimps, monkeys, etc.), and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
The religious folks do use this reasoning, usually by denying that humans are descended from chimps or monkeys. They are, strictly speaking, correct, since (contemporary) chimps and monkeys are not our ancestors. But we are primates; we share relatively recent common ancestors with other primates. Some of those common ancestors looked a lot like chimps (5 million years ago) or monkeys (20 million years ago). But they weren't (modern) chimps or (modern) monkeys, they were ancestral primates.
Similarly, tyrannosaurs were not ancestral to birds. But nobody claims that birds evolved from tyrannosaurs. The claim is that they shared a common ancestor (between 150 and 200 million years ago), and that ancestor was apparently a theropod dinosaur. It wasn't a tyrannosaur or bird; they hadn't evolved yet. The term "theropod" refers to a large branch of the dinosaur tree whose sub-branches include tyrannosaurs and birds.
It is pretty clear now from the fossil record that "birds are dinosaurs", in the same sense that "humans are primates" or "cattle are ungulates". In each case, there are still a lot of open question about the details of their evolutionary history. But the basic cladistic trees are fairly well determined.
Actually, the idea that birds are dinosaurs isn't new. It was proposed and discussed in the early 1800's. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize very well, so the usual scientific reaction was "That's interesting; can you find some more evidence?" Until the very recently, the only avian fossils from before the 65-million-year disaster were the 5 Archaeopterix fossils. Not much evidence. Then, around 1980, Chinese paleontologists discovered the Liaoning formations, full of fossils. This included the remains of lots of more birds and similar small dinosaurs. For several decades now, paleontologists have been going wild studying the confused, tangled mess of 120- to 180-million-year-old bones and trying to organize them into a consistent tree.
Of course, birds still don't fossilize very well. The debate over the details of their family tree is raging, and probably will continue for decades. But the rough outline is slowly emerging.
To learn a lot more, ask google about "Liaoning avian fossil". That'll get around 900 hits, which should keep you busy for a few weeks. Then omit the "avian", and you'll have months of' good reading on the general topic (17,700 hits right now), including the non-avian theropod dinosaurs with feather-like coverings.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.