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T. Rex Protein Analysis Supports Dinosaur-Bird Link
LanMan04 writes "For the first time, researchers have read the biological signature of a Tyrannosaur — a signature that confirms the increasingly accepted view that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. Analyzing the organic material (collagen protein) found inside the unique fossil linked the collagen to several extant species. The bottom line is that the T. rex's biological signature was most like a bird's, at least based on the first fragmentary data. "It looks like chicken may be the closest among all species that are present in today's databases for proteins and genomes," one of the scientists interviewed said."
Now I know why ... everything tastes like chicken
Birds: Not da mama!
Scientists: Yes, they were.
(Yes, it's mentioned in the article.)
I rewatched it a few months ago, and found it interesting that some of the concepts about dinosaurs that characters in the film considered "out there" -- namely, that dinosaurs evolved into birds, and that they were probably warm-blooded -- are pretty much the mainstream view today.
Everybody knows T. Rex walked along with Adam and Eve. Well, maybe not "knows," but "believes."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Does it taste like chicken? MMMmmmm T-Rex Wings.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I don't know whether to go with a "tastes like dinosaur" or "Chicken of Bristol" remark. Decisions, decisions.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Interesting resolution to an old debate:
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? T-Rex!
I've always thought roosters had that look in their eye.. you know.... like they'd eat you in a second, if they could.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I'd just like to say "How the mighty have fallen".
This is pretty awesome. I know this has been a theory for many years now but to have it actually confirmed is another win for the scientific community. Its times like this that it boggles my mind how some people of faith can ignore all proof of evolution.
I, for one, welcome our flightless, warm-blooded, aviary-predecessing overlords.
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
How would the machines know what a T-Rex's DNA was like.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
So, the former "top of the food chain" eventually becomes the staple to the successors of mere vermin in his time.
In a few tens of millions of years, tiny little human decedents will be eaten by large intelligent mice.
I was thinking bone marrow possibly or reminants of hair or some such items trapped within the fossels. I think you can get DNA from marrow but I may be wrong...
"Dinosaur fossils? God put those there to test our faith."
"I think God put you here to test my faith, Dude."
The enemies of Democracy are
I, for one, welcome our new edible and delicious overloads (hmmm extra crispy or original recipe ....)
As if a hundred million anti-evolutionists screamed in terror and then were suddenly silenced by scientific proof.
I'm more curious about what methods they used to "isolate the collagen proteins". From my understanding ALL fossils are not the real bone or organic matter that the animal once was, but a mineral deposit in the shape of the once present organic material. So how did you get T.Rex dna out of a non-organic rock formed like a bone?
Dinos invented it, then birds ripped off the idea like Microsoft would have done.
This is why I always tell my 5/yo; Dino (shaped chicken) Nuggets are made with *REAL* dinosaurs! It's a fact.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
...it tastes like chicken. /obligatory
More music, fewer hits
as giant 40-foot toothed chickens chase them across the countryside. protests in England have already begun to protect the foxes.
breeding farmer Clancy Hogtrough said, "Hail, all I wanted to do was slow down those three-legged chickens of mine. Never found out if they were tasty, cause we could never catch 'em."
we hope to re-establish our satellite link shortly for our live report from Cuddles Fernbreath....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
A reasearch team has found some T-Rex fossils found in a hole show traces of plant oils and other materials. The research team leader, Dr K.F.C. Saunders, reports that initial spectral analysis suggests that the dinosaurs rolled about in breadcrumbs and a mix of twenty as yet unidentified herbs and spices before jumping into boiling oil.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I know the article doesn't mention a match with parrots but my girlfriend has a blue front amazon and I swear they act just like how I would think a T Rex would act. They growl and they even have "orange eyes" when they are totally pissed off or excited... Q A K
All I want to know is when will I achieve my childhood dream of owning my own triceratops. Parking pass? I don't need no stinkin' parking pass!
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
Wait till you have the breast meat and drum sticks.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Thats one way of making sure you do not have to pay child support.
Just send your sample to a lab that takes millions of years to process your paternity test.
I would love to know just how similar the proteins were. Here is interesting research showing how the human and chicken genomes are also very similar. http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/chicken_gen ome_041208.html
Not sure what the T-Rex data proves, other than lots of creatures have a similar genetic composition to a chicken. Guess this means that I'm "related" to a T-rex too, since I apparently came from a chicken...could explain my short arms and overbite.
I'm more interested in the fact that T-Rex soft tissue can survive for, supposedly, 65M years...
"The Bible? Evolution put it there to test our stupidity."
"I think Evolution put you here to test my superiority, Dude."
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The scariest chicken to ever have walked on earth!
No more than a week, I reckon.
I always thought Marc Bolan was simply an awesome musician. Now I found out that he's also performing protein analysis from beyond the grave. T. Rex... still the best.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/bird.html
secondly, i'm not sold here. it may well do what they claim - or it might not.
what i want them to do is to take KNOWN species and run the same test to see if any known, distinct species *appear* to be descended from one another using their methodology.
seems easy enough to do, so why not do it? wouldn't it tell us how accurate the analysis is?
one needs to look at this data in context in order to properly value what it is telling us.
that context is absent from the article and, perhaps, from the study.
why limit it to fossils? again, why not test the veracity of this analysis against a number of knowns to see if the results reflect what we'd expect?
funny, everyone i heard trumpeting dinosaurs as obvious transitional entities to birds didn't use to say their belief was a mere hypothesis.
also, what were the differences found? did any of the results match anything else? what came in second and how close in second was it? did it have any similarities to fish?
i'm afraid that scientists have lost the valuable trait of skepticism when it comes to this kind of thing. a little data comes in and it is trumpeted without much effort to question it or provide context.
if you didn't click the first time i posted it, click this time:
http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/bird.html
no, it isn't a right wing religious diatribe. it is a skeptical scientist that believes in macro-evolution who has the integrity to question what everyone so dearly wants to be true.
VOICE OF GORGOS
Every time we excavate it bothers your friends
That you'd let the mammals be the cause of your end
Was it something special that we can't comprehend?
Why could you not stick around until the Age of Men?
If you came today you could have eaten whole nations
The Mesozoic era had no overpopulation
Don't you get me wrong - I only want to know.
CHOIR
Tyro Rex, Tyro Rex
Are you the best that Nature selects?
Tyro Rex, Supersaur
Why is it that you exist no more?
VOICE OF GORGOS
Tell me your opinion of the great carnivores
Who'd you think could ever rival King of the Saurs?
Sabertooth was mighty tough the stories do tell
But Tyro you were greatest and you knew that very well
Could you know of Barnum Brown who'd be first to find you?
Did you think Roy Chapman Andrews
Would today enshrine you?
Don't you get me wrong - I only want to know.
CHOIR
Tyro Rex, Tyro Rex
Are you the best that Nature selects?
Tyro Rex, Supersaur
Why is it that you exist no more?"
FULL LIBRETTO: Tyro Rex Supersaur
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
we all know that parakeets are directly descended from T. Rex thanks to Red Dwarf:
0 3/deck_fs.html&page=season8.html
http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/index.cfm?frameset=deck
click on pete part 2 link (needs realplayer -grrrrr)
-I'm just sayin'
I don't think I'll ever look at a chicken in quite the same way again... :)
Kentucky Fried T-rex
This evidence does not prove that a chicken is related to a t-rex.... only that a link is possible.
!sig
I feel certain it took a great many scientists a long time (and probably some illegal substances) to recover from the shock. This was most definitely not what they had expected. They've been MRI-ing T-Rex bones ever since, from the sounds of it - Slashdot has covered several stories on bone structures discovered on the interior, for example. (The original bone was thought to have been from a female T-Rex, as it had some internal structure that exists in modern female birds but not in males.)
Anyway, it looks like the material from this bone has now been analysed. They never expected to recover any DNA - there was no evidence of cellular material when they made their initial announcement - but to have extracted specific proteins is a fantastic piece of work. Serendipitous, sure, but fantastic nonetheless.
It will be interesting to know when (not if) other fossils are found to have surviving internal organic matter. You don't really want to go smashing fossils up unnecessarily, so I imagine MRI manufacturers will be rather busy over the next few years. So what if you've found 1% of the material you'd like? A hundred such finds is not impossible, now we know it can happen. It's the overall coverage these researchers can get that will matter in the end, not the coverage in an individual bone.
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)
And right before the tyranasaur swallowed monkey, monkey chanted a curse, a curse that one day the tyranasaurs would become slaves to the monkey.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
It is interesting that the dinosaurs are closer to the birds than other vertebrates (frogs and newts), verifying what was hypothesized from morphological data. However, the really neat comparison will be with the alligators and crocodiles but, apparently, collagen sequences are not yet available for those taxa.
In other news we here that bats are confirmed as mammals.
Seriously, how often do we need to hear that birds are dinosaurs, and that they are the only surviving group of them.
Bats wouldn't seize to be mammals, even if we killed all mammals except the bats. Is this really an issue any longer?
To those who think this will shut up evolution-deniers: Keep dreaming. Creationism has nothing to do with science, the only thing that will change a creationist's mind is a potent hallucination of God telling them evolution is real. No amount of scientific evidence, however persuasive, can sway a delusional mind.
... how difficult it is to see big animals in the wild.
You can literally run into an elephant, a rhino or many other creatures without noticing.
I have done some driving in Etosha National Park in Namibia, in several ocassions I had close encounters with elephants that were barely visible behind the trees and bushes.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... was dead and buried around 150 years ago, not by Darwin, but by geologists.
And later on by astronomers, geophysicists, climatologists, geneticists, etc, etc, etc, for crying out loud.
The science of compared anatomy isn't that new either, but by the nonsense you ejaculate one would suspect all the disciplines above are pulling all the millons of years of natural phenomena out of their un-skeptical asses, you would want us to forget they arrived to similar conclussion by different, independent observations.
You would like us believe that the "evolutionists" are a weird group of people that wish to trick us into some beliefs that are completely esoteric. I have got news for you: many different scientific fields are supporting the conslussions of evolutionary theory. The body of evidence is so overwhelming that I can't believe I still have to write rebuttals to put to shame the uninformed, baseless opinions of evolution deniers.
Even John Paul II, Pope of the Catholic Church (the biggest and most important Christian denomination in the world) stated that Evolution is more than a theory,
As for anybody expressing doubts about the process of evolution by means of natural selection I would class them as nuts plain and simple, their religion or political affilitaion is of no interest to me. If they tend to be religious fundamentalists with fascist tendencies (they would love to impose into all of us their world view) it is purely incidental.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
IF the soft tissue is found in a layer of soil millions of years old that puts in question our knowledge about how soft tissue decmoposses, and about how long live matter may be preserved and as mentioned elsewhere, about how fossilization may work in some xpecial circumstances.
The tissue is still millions of years old, that has not changed, throwing around wild theories without any substantiation whatsoever (bar your fertile imagination) is not a way to make science.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yeah, if I had to take a wild guess I'd say it was about a week too so I guess that settles it. I suppose we'll have to revalutae the whole age of the Earth thing but to be honest I had a dream a while back which seemed to cast some doubt on that anyway.
This kind of finding never happened before, that is why scientists believed it was not possible.
That does not change the fact that the material was embedded in a fossilized bone millions of years old in a soil layer millions of years old.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
RTFA, really, you ought it to yourself.
In it it clearly says that what was found *is not* DNA.
Now, assuming old DNA was ever found, that would only demonstrate that our chemistry knowledge regarding DNA was not complete, that would not invalidate all the other unccountable fields of scientific knowledge that show evolution by natural selection to be correct.
As for your ludicrous claims regarding carbon dating and bones of humans and dinosarus really pal, we can't help you out there, if you ever want to come from the dark ages you will need to do that by yourself.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They chickened out!
Here is it:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/58
Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass Spectrometry
Here is a choice quote: A BLAST alignment and similarity search (23) of the five T. rex peptides from collagen {alpha}1t1 as a group against the all-taxa protein database showed 58% sequence identity to chicken, followed by frog (51% identity) and newt (51% identity). The small group of peptide sequence data reported here support phylogenetic hypotheses suggesting that T. rex is most closely related to birds among living organisms whose collagen sequence is present in protein databases (24-26). This article documents previous research:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/31
Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein
Not about anything else the trolls have been trying to imply on this thread.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/05101 0085411.htm
From the article:
The researchers also examinedevidence from five independent, agreeing studies involving structuraland genetic analyses related to the "tridactyl," or three-fingered,hand, which is composed of digits 1, 2 and 3 in dinosaurs, Feducciasaid. That is the most critical characteristic linking birds todinosaurs. They found that embryos of developing birds differedsignificantly in that bird wings arose from digits 2, 3 and 4, theequivalent of index, middle and ring fingers of humans. To change soradically during evolution would be highly unlikely.
"If birds descended from dinosaurs, we would expect the same 1, 2 and 3 pattern," he said.
Currentdinosaurian dogma requires that all the intricate adaptations of birds'wings and feathers for flight evolved in a flightless dinosaur and thensomehow became useful for flight only much later, Feduccia said. Thatis "close to being non-Darwinian."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Ohhhh... SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GET A LIFE! Otherwise I'm gonna have to lay the smackdown on yo azz. Beyotch! -- (Hint to the clueless: There's a Beavis and Butthead reference in there. In other words... laugh. It's funny.)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I guess they do!
-m
I'm aware of is folks going for the ranch dip and the cervesa... at least the way it gets cooked around here ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
No offence to anyone, but they are stretching the method a bit too far. Since I have a lot of experience with the method, I'll give you the redux. What you are supposed to do is extract the protein, analyze and sequence the portions of the sequence and then compare them to the genome (so DNA) of the organism you are studying. The search will identify the places on the genome where the analyzed sequences fit and allow you to fill the missing gaps. Once you have the full sequence (and only then) you run a comparison (or homology) search against the sequence of the same protein in another organism. So the problem here is that not only the genomes of the mastodont, ostrich and T-Rex are not known, but also the genomes of their closest relatives alive today, such as elephant or aligator, were not available.
So the authors did their sequence analysis and in case of the mastodont and ostrich they got ~30% of the sequence, meaning that they detected and identified portions of the protein containing about 30% of its amino acids. For T-Rex they do not say how much sequence they recovered, but from the experimental data it looks poor, much less than what was obtained for the other two samples. This is where a major fudge comes in. In order to run comparisons you need more than 30%. So what you do is you take what you have and fill in the blanks from DNA of chicken, newt and frog, with modifications as you see fit. And suprise, suprise, the T-Rex has 58% of the sequence identical to chicken and about 50% to newt and frog. So the frog has much less in common with the T-Rex as it has with the Man (81% similarity).
Not to diss the work completely, the experimental part, the fact that they were able to extract and sequence proteins from a 68 millions years old creature is amazing, but their analysis is bullshit.
"When does nature ever produce slow ungainly hunters?"
Dick Cheney
During the time Jurassic Park was written some scientists classified Deinonychus antirrhopus as a (big) species of Velociraptor. These dinosaurs were man sized and the raptors in the movie represented pretty well what scientists believed they would look like (e.g. the skull resembled D. antirrhopus, not an oversized Velociraptor mongoliensis). Afaik it was the largest dromaeosaurid (those with the hook claw on the foot) species known until Utahraptor was discovered (more than 2m/7ft tall).
But accurate nomenclature is generally hard (especially when you get down to the species/subspecies level) with animals you can only judge by their appearance (instead of using genetical analysis).
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
That's my word for the day.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
ME BEING HUGE!! -1, offtopic
Not the other way around.
In that article there is this:
"When Schweitzer demineralized the T. rex bone, she was surprised to find such a matrix, because current theories of fossilization held that no original organic material could survive that long."
The thought of course that the original material isn't all that old goes against the "old age" dogma of evolutionists and isn't even brought up as a possibility. If the creationists are right, who assert that the long ages of millions of years in reality are only thousands, then Dr. Mary Schweitzer would not need be surprised. It is well established that living matter can be preserved for thousands of years, but not millions.
This fossil is literally the ONLY FOSSIL EVER FOUND from millions of years ago that contains intact protein structures.
MILLIONS of other fossils of similar age found around the world have never shown any such thing. But the geology and chemistry of the location where this fossil was found explain why it was exceptionally well-preserved.
If it's really only thousands of years old, then you have to explain why no other dinosaur fossils ever found, anywhere, have shown protein preservation.
Taking similarity of human and frog's collagen as a baseline of something not so similar in this case, we can easily see that the article says quite opposite to what it should say, namely, if the article proves anything, it is that the "link" between birds and dinos is as solid as link between humans and frogs.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Well in a way I was pretty much expecting something like this to turn up. Dinosaurs are indeed a strange mixture that have tell tale signs of both reptilious and bird traits that make them related to both families, much more related to the bird side, obviously in respects to this new find. This is a most facinating discovery indeed! They have rumored to go on saying in USA Today that the next closest living relative of the T-Rex after the Chicken is the Frog, and after that, the Newt. I found it very curious those last two relations are amphibians. We know of the close relationship between reptile and amphibian, but after this much dino evolution? Something rather curious is a foot here. Not to imply that the dinosaurs were infact like amphibians or anything. (That'd just be obsurd.) But after looking at all of the different traits, hollow bones and quick growth rate, bird related, structure of bones and overall design of the dinosaurs (including the rare find of fossilized skin), reptile related, the possibility of dinosaurs, especially the predators, were warm blooded creatures which is related to mamals and also apparent in birds. All these different mish mosh of traits leads me to a theory... maybe its impossible to class a dinosaur as any specific animal type. Perhaps, when this many unique traits plagues an animal, perhaps it is safe to give it a class of its own. I'm going to sound like a quack for saying this, but what if dinosaurs were not solely reptile, or solely bird related. Maybe the very definition of a dinosaur should be in its own class. Perhaps it fits. Fish, Reptile, Mammal, Amphibian, Bird, and Dinosaur. Crack pot theorist out.