Slashdot Mirror
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
Does it taste like chicken? MMMmmmm T-Rex Wings.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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
How would the machines know what a T-Rex's DNA was like.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Well, given that chickens are identified as the closest living relatives, it appears that the Flintstones eating barbecued dinos weren't all that far "out there" either.
Have you read my blog lately?
I remember sneering when it was brought up with tones of awe and wonder; I think it was accepted pretty commonly earlier than the movie suggested at the very least.
This sort of stuff always makes me laugh...The idea that bigass dino's like the T-Rex were slow and ungainly hunters...When does nature ever produce slow ungainly hunters? The selection is always for high speed or decent speed and endurance.
Saw a special about the first filming of the giant squid a few months ago (though it was an old documentary), and they were talking about how the theory had been that the giant squid was a lazy predator that just hung out with it's arms dangling, snagging things that drifted through them, and that what the film suggested was that it was a fast, energetic predator...They're saying this with awe, like it had never occurred to them that this could be the case, while showing film of smaller squids doing their lightning fast attacks.
In retrospect it seems silly to have ever believed that dinosaurs could have been anything like as slow as was commonly thought, but it's a mistake that is not uncommon.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"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 ....)
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?
I'll give it a try.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two former drumsticks, turn'd to stone,
Stand in Wyoming. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And razor teeth and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those proteins read
Which yet survive, stamp'd in this lifeless thing,
The hand that mock'd them and the mouth that fed.
And in the fossil rock these words appear:
"My name is Tyrannosaur, Chicken King"
Look on my works, ye primates, and cluck!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal Rex, asteroid-fuck'd,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley. I think it's still a sonnet.
In fact, Ornithiscia one of the latin names to describe a certain dinosaur lineage translates as "bird hips" -- but in fact birds descended from the , or Saurischia, or "lizard hip" dinosaurs.
The curious thing that birds, dinosaurs and mammals all have in common is the placement of the legs underneath the body. This is what made it possible for dinosaurs and mammals to get so big. Other lizards are stuck with their legs sticking out to the sides, which limits weight-bearing capacity and means the really big ones are primarily aquatic.
What makes this curious is that this particular innovation appears to have only evolved once in some common ancestor of mammals and dinosaurs. This suggests it must be very unlikely to evolve--much less likely than other things like wings and eyes, which have evolved independently many times. Maybe the early fossil record will eventually show that it in fact arose more than once, but it's such a huge advantage that if it were possible to get it easily one would think that it would be done more often, and it is odd that no other reptile has ever pulled it off.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
what I especially like about Jurassic park is that Speilberg decided they had to have six foot tall Velociraptors for the film, which was considered absurd, then within months six foot tall Velociraptor fossils were discovered.
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...
A few references for anyone interested...
John Ostrom of Yale University definitely supported the theory that birds might have evolved from a theropod dinosaur branch back in the early 1980's, I believe. Dr. Ostrom's ideas were then popularized by the publication of Dr. Robert Bakker's book "The Dinosaur Heresies", which is an interesting, colorful read, although admittedly Bakker doesn't always stick strictly to the science and he seems to rely too heavily on cladistic studies which don't take chronologies into consideration.
John Horner's "Digging Dinosaurs" was published not long after "The Dinosaur Heresies" and documents Horner's excavation of fossilized maiasaur nests containing crushed eggshells and bones of juvenile animals with incompletely developed joints, suggesting that they stayed in the nests and were cared for, similar to the way modern birds care for their hatchlings.
In the book "Jurassic Park" it is quite clear that Michael Crichton was aware of the work of Ostrom, Bakker and Horner, and in fact it seemed to me that he modeled his character Alan Grant after John Horner.
Regarding the size of the velociraptors in "Jurassic Park", at the time of its publication I don't recall that any six-foot-tall velociraptors had been discovered. However, a closely related species, Deinonychus, was known at the time, and it actually fits Crichton's description better than the velociraptors that were originally excavated in Asia.
Also, for anyone interested and close enough to visit, Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT has two Deinonychus models (I don't think they're original fossils, which would be quite rare) on display in its great room.
"...The curious thing that birds, dinosaurs and mammals all have in common is the placement of the legs underneath the body..."
There were animals with legs on the back of their bodies but they found themselves extinct shortly after
Because normal Christian nuts are quite happy to accept that God created Evolution, and the Bible is not a science text book. On account of the incontravertible evidence
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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