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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."
I for one welcome our...
...anyway...
*sigh*
within 10 years there will be an accident at a small island.....
Does this mean I can have a t-rex as a pet in a few years? Please?
The. Movies. Must. End. Here.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Now all we need to do is fill in the missing pieces of the DNA with frog DNA to make them sterile and we can have an amusement park! It worked well in the movies. Wait, how did that end? I suggest we send Bush, Britany Spears, K-Fed and Nancy Grace to open the park ;)
today is spelling optional day.
Perhaps get Dolly the sheep to sign up as a surrogate mother?
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
god put that bone there to test our faith!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
Dude, this is a YEAR OLD! And slashdot ran this exact same story last year. Look at the dates on the pictures!
Credit: From Schweitzer et al., Science 307:1952-1955 (2005). Reprinted with permission from AAAS.
Geez!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
You're right that it's old news. It was a bit sensationalist in that it's not really soft tissue but rather a stable polymerization of the soft tissue. Still, it remains an important discovery, and I'm still waiting for more follow-up.
In your obvious haste to be first to point this out you clearly just linked to the first source you found on a simple search, which is a nutty creationist website. How about a slightly less wacky news source?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I don't believe this has much impact on creationism, but young-earth creationists have been pointing to claims of finding blood cells in Dinasaur bones for a while. I remember reading it in 2003 on a site that was pretty old at that point. It is interesting that the finding that was difficult to track down and corroborate then, is now validated in some way with this finding.
When I tracked this on some debate forums, I saw some general debate about how petrification might happen quicker or slower than we currently know. I'm not sure if this will or won't settle the matter, I assume it would only if petrification was the means we have been relying on to date materials.
But if there is one moral of science to take from this, it is that the real world has many suprises in store for what we assume to be pat scientific knowledge.
This is more like the recent bestseller "Tyrannosaur Canyon" by Douglas J Preston than it is like Jurassic Park. That book involves the discovery of a complete T Rex fossil with soft tissue.
Where were you when the voynix came?
This begs the most abvious question. What does T-Rex tast like?
You make soup out of bones? Get it? T-Rex soup? Sigh, evermind...
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
If the soft tissue really is dino tissue, instead of a post-mortem parasite or something, then I would hope the act of breaking the bone did not disturb it (and why in the world is "not fitting in helo" a good reason to break such a priceless artifact anyway???). That tissue is a great source of biological residue, the goldmine being DNA. But it's very easy to contaminate ancient DNA, so I hope they were *really* *really* careful when they broke that bone (*cringes*) and loaded it for transport.
Are you kidding me? Either you didn't even bother to read the very article you linked to or you have the reading comprehension of a 3rd grader. The ENTIRE ARTICLE you linked is riddled with young earth creationist conspiracy wackyness!! It does matter what your source is for news. It always matters.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Every time a biology related story is posted the discussion degenerates to Creationism vs. Evolution.
Which makes me wonder why. I mean, we don't start discussing whether Santa Claus exists every time a Christmas related story pops up, why do we talk about creationism?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It must've been masturbating....
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Further lab analysis shows that this TRex died by rolling in breadcrumbs and jumping into a pool of boiling oil. Either that or a some one on the excatvation site dropped a chicken McNugget.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I mean, we don't start discussing whether Santa Claus exists every time a Christmas related story pops up, why do we talk about creationism?
Because there's no large group of people out there that actually believe Santa Claus exists, and are trying to force our children to be taught that "Clausology" is a scientific theory?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
DNA isn't an especially robust molecule. It probably didn't survive that long. It is prone to a variety of reactions that will degrade it over time relatively quickly. Though it was originally thought to survive much longer, DNA older than a million years is now considered pretty dubious, and is likely contamination from other sources, such as soil microbes, or it is degraded fragments with no meaningful signal left in them (e.g., older DNA extracted from fossils tens of millions of years old contains roughly equal left and right amino acids, whereas living tissues contain all left ones, implying the DNA has been severely degraded). Previous discoveries from fossils tens of millions of years old (e.g., from old amber) have proven unreproducible. There's a good review in this PDF format paper by Hofreiter et al., 2001.
By contrast, some organic molecules, such as collagen, are much more durable than DNA, and could plausibly survive much longer in the right conditions, such as if embedded in the minerals that form bone. This general fact has been known for a long time (those papers are from the 1960s and are both PDFs), though how old such remains might ultimately be found is still uncertain. Also, even if the organic molecules were severely degraded, it doesn't mean they vanish completely -- some degraded C-bearing organic residue might remain as long as it wasn't dissolved away, and it could still preserve the shape of the original tissues, even if it wasn't compositionally the same anymore.
Some organic molecules are extraordinarily durable and occur as fossils routinely. The sporopollenin that forms the cell wall of spores and pollen is like the "plastic garbage bag" of organic materials. It can survive multiple passages through the digestive system of animals, and still be intact. Fossil pollen and spores are often recovered from sedimentary rocks essentially unchanged, except for a bit of thermal alteration, and geologists use potent acids like concentrated HCl and HF to dissolve the minerals away, but the pollen and spores are untouched!
Finally, even if the organic molecules themselves get destroyed (e.g., it isn't, say, collagen anymore), minerals could precipitate in contact with the soft tissues and preserve their shape at microscopic scale. The soft tissue isn't actully there, but the structure is. Such preservation is rare, but is known for other types of soft tissues in an older dinosaur (the linked example of the dinosaur Scipionyx does show soft-tissue structures, such as intestines, but they are all mineralized).
Time to start cloning those babies and burying them.
Only terrorists want the president eaten by fictional dinosaurs!
Oh yeah? Then who are all of those people I line up with every year to see him at the mall? HMM??? You've tried to put us down for years with all of your "facts" and "science," but we all know the truth.
Keep talking like that, mister, and you're going to find a lump of coal in your stocking this year...
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
How is that a good reason?
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That is a serious answer.
Fossils straight out of the field are really heavy and a T-Rex thigh bone is really big.
You can't just strap that kinda weight to (one of) a helicopter's skids, assuming the helicopter had skids. Worse, most helicopters don't have weight bearing mounts for attaching nets to do a lift operation.
Or maybe that's just standard procedure for paleontologists with really big fossils.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If scientists specializing in clausology are able to determine the exact mechanism by which the Claus Man is able to deliver all those gifts in a single night, we will have a solution to the world's energy problems.
That is the promise that study of Clausology holds out to all of mankind and people here are scoffing at it? I think they're astroturfers here on behalf of the oil industry...
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
Of course it's a year old. I've been brushing up on my Unix skills, just in case. What about you?
children are not people in the legal sense of the word, they're property with some rights
RTFA. They haven't found any DNA and said that scientists don't believe that DNA can last 7 million years so they don't expect to find any.
How about this, RTFParagraph.
Does this discovery of soft dinosaur tissue mean that scientists will soon be able to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex? Probably not most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.
This discovery has shown that "most scientists" can be wrong. So it's quite possible that they're wrong about how long DNA can last.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The article doesn't say HOW IT SMELLED!
:)
This is the key point - surely? If it were rotten, then it would smell bloody awful (pun intended), and there'd by no chance of any DNA surviving. But what if it DID NOT smell awful? Surely that's an immediate indication of preservation?
And if it did NOT smell, you'd only have a TINY window of opportunity to perform tests on it - before oxygen started to do its oxidising thing.
Personally, I'd start placing bets with reputable gambling houses in the U.K. that a dinosaur will re re-constituted from ancestral DNA before 2050.
I'm reminded of the line by Dr. Malcolm;
"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming." See Signature.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Carbon dating is not reliable at all. It was a mistake for it to be used and trusted so much. Now all these assumptions of age are base on flawed data. http://www.drdino.com/articles.php?spec=79
I mean, we don't start discussing whether Santa Claus exists every time a Christmas related story pops up
Oh come on, nobody seriously questions the existence of Santa Claus. All of us gentile children receive very real, tangible evidence of his existence. This sets Santa Claus head and shoulders above characters like God, Jesus, the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the FSM (pasta be upon him!). We could debate whether or not there really is a Santa Clause, but it's really a moot question. The debate would serve no purpose in the face of overwhelming evidence of Santa's continued existence.
The more interesting argument, I think, is why Santa continues to hold to medieval beliefs about the inherent superiority of the children of the aristocracy. He continues to this day to give the children of wealthy parents higher value gifts and a higher overall average number of presents. Clearly he missed the bourgeois revolution.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Doesn't matter if it's soft inside..it's still scary as shit.
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!
"If the theory of gravity were so scientific, there would be no concern of how this would be interpreted by people which believed they could flap their arms and fly."
It doesn't matter how well proven a fact of science is, there will always be those who deny it due to their willful ignorance or fanaticism. If the only people they harm in the process are themselves, no great loss. If, however, they have access to children or other innocents -- picture a doctor who doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease -- they become dangerous.
Creationists teach lies to children, lies which make them, as adults, less capable of understanding the universe as it is. The universe is dangerous enough when we do understand it -- it is infinitely more so when we don't.
T-Rex BBQ Grill
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Are you kidding? That article says that Carbon dating is inaccurate because it doesn't take into account the massive cloud of water vapor used by some theologians to explain the Great Flood as depicted in the Bible. The author goes on to say that no carbon-14 would remain after 10 half lives, which indicates that he has no idea what a half-life is.
Scientists never said C-14 dating was 100% accurate. Carbon-14 is formed in the atmosphere when cosmic radiation reacts with Nitrogen. The accuracy if carbon dating depends on how constant the amount of nitrogen in the air is, and how much cosmic radiation hits the atmosphere. Neither of those things are likely to have changed very much in the last 60,000 years.
Claiming both atheists and Christians indoctrinate their kids to the same degree is as ludicrous as claiming the same thing about, say, mainstream Christians and the Muslim parents who send their kids to madras schools. One doesn't have to have any particular religious persuasion to see that teaching kids a relatively complex narrative (the old and new testaments) requires more time and effort on the parts of parents than not teaching them the narrative.
Ok, work with me here...
Instead of filling in the holes with frog DNA, what would happen if we used the late Liberace's DNA? I can imagine immediate benefits to both zoological research and Vegas. Would we get, for instance:
(Thought experiment segues into dream sequence. Location: Mr. Newton's agent's office. We only hear the agent's end of the phone conversation in progress.)
"...but Wayne, baby...you know this is killing me as much as it's killing you! All I'm saying is that ya just can't get a paying gig in this town anymore unless you weight 6,000 pounds, are greenish-brown and can belt out show tunes on a Steinway. This Liberzilla fellow has just got the entire place by the short hairs! Listen--Wayne, sweetheart...I got an idea! I know this plastic surgeon, see, who also dabbles around with Human Growth Hormone...what's that? You know it, Kiddo, the stuff's illegal...but this is your career we're talking about! So hear me out here..."
(Dream sequence fast forwards 10 years ahead)
Slashdot headline:
Apple Calls It Quits on the iPod and iTunes
brontobassist writes,
(End Dream Sequence. End thought experiment.)
* * * * *
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money.
—Ed Bluestone
Yes, in Jurassic Park they used frog DNA. I never did figure out why.
Dinosaurs (Greek for "monstrous lizards") were reptiles. Frogs are amphibians. Isn't a modern reptile, like an alligator, more closely related to dinosaurs, and thus its DNA is better suited for filling the gaps, than a frog's DNA?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Thank you for the very nice article(!), but I have to correct you here, there are no amino acids in DNA. What they mean in the article is that the degree of racemisation (the process of going from all left to mixed left-right) of amino acids originating from proteins in the cell, is an indication of the degree of damage to the cell in general. So if amino acid racemisation is present, they know that probably the DNA will be in a crappy state as well and they can skip the sample.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
10 bucks says it has feathers when it's cloned.
Anything can, could, and will happen.
If you could get a copy of that lecture and put it on line it would be _great_.
Please to _not_ jump to the conclusion that DNA analysis will be futile. IMHO, quite the opposite.
In all liklihood, if we have ANY DNA available it will be a miracle. However if there is some, then the "some" will vary from cell to cell.
Thus if we map a large enough number of cells we can eventually build up the genome.
In seismic its called "stacking". You take a noisy blurry picture that you sample many times over and you "stack" it. The noise cancels. You are left with the picture.
Similarly, if you find any DNA at all, then if this is a fragment of what was in the cell to start with, and you have part of the picture.
These fragments will overlap and from these overlaps you will eventually be able to make perhaps even a complete picture. An example of this process is "diff" which most here will recognise as a programmers tool.
DNA is programming. Its molecular programming, but it is still programming.
What makes me quiver is the idea that we might be able to build up the DNA patterns by painstakingly replicating the DNA in each isolated cell and then stitching these DNA fragments together by matching the common parts of fragments found in different cells. It would be worse than putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the picture face down on the table... but it should be doable.
I suspect we will be able to tell that Dinos and Birds are, if not close cousins, then perhaps close 2nd cousins. In fact the birds by even be decendants. If decendants, then one would expect large amounts of dino DNA may still be found in bird DNA... and that it is just inactive or that its function is modified. The cell is a rather promiscous DNA xerox machine.
To go way out on a limb... if we can sequence the DNA and stitch it together, then we may be able to find living cells with a biochemistry close enough to Dino DNA that we can in fact make a working cell. Clearly we would be inserting artificial DNA into a cell. But it doesn't matter where the DNA comes from and how it came about - what matters is the proper sequence of DNA bases.
This is clearly along the idea that if you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters that they would create Shakespear's sonnets.
Well - the DNA stitching won't be random. The question is how much of the original picture is still preserved.
Every cell is a copy of every other cell in a given individual. As cells specialize they turn off some of the DNA. The DNA is still there.
Maybe some day we will actually be able to create a working Dino cell. Creataceous park... HERE WE GO!
Its an old story. I read the previous slashdot story last year. Probably our editors were bored on a Sunday morning and wanted to see if we would remember. Criticisms aside... your update is interesting.
So.. what progress has been made in the DNA studies?
Strange though that none of the egyptians and romans or incas or whatever mentioned them.
I think there are dragon/giant serpent legends in many cultures. Probably one of the most interesting is the Chinese years. Rat, Ox, Tiger, Hare, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig. Why 11 real animals and 1 mythical?
Mythology is not science, of course, but the dragons etc from most cultures mythology could well be dinosaurs, possibly they even found dinosaur fossils and made up stories around them.
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But even then it would depend on how the concept of a "genetic clone" is seen by Talmudic lore.
Since we're on the OT thread of taste...
So two cannibals are eating a clown when one says to the other, "Does this taste funny to you?"
I am not religious, so please don't take this the wrong way. But why must we assume that our theories of soft-tissue preservation are incorrect, rather than our theories of radio carbon-dating fossils?
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."