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Soft Tissue Discovered In T-Rex Bone
kubla2000 writes, "Paleontologists have discovered soft tissue inside the fossilized thigh bone of a T-Rex. The tissue included blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells." From the article: "When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage. However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue... was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible."
This weekend I had the opportunity to attend a brief lecture by the world renowned paleontologist Jack Horner. It was his team that made the discovery of this T-Rex which was actually discovered by a guy named Bob and thus he named it B-Rex! They did have a problem lifting the thigh bone from the sight so they did have to cut it and they did discover soft tissue; they also discovered that the dinosaur bones actually were more similar to the structure found in avains (birds, chickens, etc) after decalsifying the soft tissue they found blood vessels and inside the blood vessels they did find red blood cells.
From their discovery they were able to determine the sex of the dinosaur whose remains they had found (something to do with the build up of the bone and the soft tissue) - it was female. They also found that the bone structure had concentric circles much like a tree and thus they were able to tell the age of the dinosaur at the time of it's death (which was 18yrs old).
In the end he concluded that we would not be able to re-construct a dinosaur solely from the DNA found in the red blood cells since only a few of the DNA strands were intact enough to do a proper analysis and since chicken DNA has about a million different DNA strands that we'd be a long way from making a real dinosaur... not to mention that we do not currently have the know how on how to convert DNA into a living organism!