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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
>
>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.
"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...
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
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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
Whoever clones one first! I mean, who's gonna argue with a guy who has a friggin T-REX backing him up?
I thought that specifying that the bone was only 10,000 years old was bad, but when you talked about drinking White Zinfandel, your ignorance was confirmed... ;)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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
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
...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
No, no, no. God created the Dinosaurs extinct. Apparently he really liked the idea of dinosaurs, but thought they were too homosexual.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.