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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."
The. Movies. Must. End. Here.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
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!
Meme's aside, rather than welcoming the usual overlords, I'm just going to say that I welcome the opportunity to add Tyrannosaur meat to my next barbecue. Let's start cloning these things soon, guys. Dinner's waiting.
Ever get the feeling that the people who don't have anything to say are the ones doing the majority of the talking?
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.
Only terrorists want the president eaten by fictional dinosaurs!
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!
Do not let them put a rack of T-Rex ribs on your car, it'll tip over.