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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*
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.
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!
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!"
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).
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.
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
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!
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.