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Dinosaur Fossil Found With Preserved Soft Tissue
damn_registrars writes "A fossilized hadrosaur has been uncovered in South Dakota that has preserved soft tissue. This is described as a "mummified" dinosaur, and allows for a look at the skin and musculature of some parts of this animal. The find was reported by a 24 year old Yale graduate student of paleontology."
According to the FTA, the find was originally located in 1999, and partially excavated in 2004 with a full investigation commencing in 2006. Having never studied archeology or paleontology, is it common for sites like this to be passed by even though there is something located there?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Also, since I just watched Bender's Big Score repeatedly, "It's DOLOMITE, baby!"
You see, beneath the fossil's crunchy, mineral shell, there's still a creamy core of hadrosaur nougat!
My work here is dung.
From the summary, I was hoping it would be actual dinosaur jerky. But it's actually fossilized tissue -- neat, and a rare find, but not enough for any actual biochemistry.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This isn't like that other discovery where what appeared to be red tissue was found inside a bone. This is just fossilized soft tissue. No soft tissue is present, just the mineral representation of what the tissue would have looked like, its structure, etc.
This isn't the first time they've gotten soft tissue from a dinosaur. A few years ago, they were trying to haul some dinosaur bones from a dig site by helocopter, but the bones wouldn't fit. After trying to solve the problem several ways, they made the agonized decision to break some of the largest bones. When they broke them open, they found soft tissue in one of them (I think it was a femur). A friend of mine (getting his phd in bioinfomatics) mentioned that they had managed to extract dinosaur proteins from this, and that because proteins are much more unstable then nucleic acids, it was entirely likely that they could extract dinosaur DNA from the specimen.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
A team of creationist paleontologists from the Discovery Institute's main field research arm announced today that they had discovered the remains of a large manmade object confirmed to be an ancient dinosaur saddle. The Discovery Institute's discovery was discovered in the remote Dusty Rivers area of southwestern Arizona. A spokesman for the paleontological team said that the dinosaur saddle provides irrefutable proof that man and dinosaurs lived simultaneously, as predicted by most creationist or "intelligent design" doctrines.
http://www.avantnews.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=126
FYI, this has happened a few times before. PBS Nova Science Now recently did a piece on something similar.
Watch Online:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/01.html
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
smashing a house when it died?
Monstar L
Also, in case anyone missed it, a few months back, some researchers extracted enough woolly mammoth DNA from mammoth hairs to sequence it
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
1. God creates dinosaurs
2. God destroys dinosaurs
3. God creates man
4. Man destroys God
5. Man creates dinosaurs
I think they stole this story from the episode of "Denver the Last Dinosaur" wherein Denver disguises himself as a mummy to avoid capture.
Another example of my childhood being recycled. Maybe them can get Michael Bay to crap all over the live-action version.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
Let me guess, that link mentions "the Discovery Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Seattle with affiliates operating at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C." and "we know Velociraptor was a vegetarian, as can be clearly deduced from its long rows of razor-sharp teeth, perfectly designed for tearing leaves from trees or rooting for truffles and other buried delicacies, and could therefore be domesticated at very low risk."
Looks like alternative [B - Joke site] is the most probable one.
the Fucking Terranosaur Article?
Some facts for you:
1.) When cloning a sheep to give birth to itself, by putting a complete strand of its own DNA in its own egg cells in its own womb, we would have a one in several hundred chance of success. We don't know why, but the rest would be miscarriages, still births, or otherwise non-viable. The cloned animal would die early of old age, nobody knows why.
2.) The Human Genome Project to sequence *ONE* complete set of DNA for a single human took us 13 years and 3 billion dollars. That's comparable to the Apollo project, to sequence *ONE* example of a complex being's DNA.
3.) DNA is relatively unstable. I doesn't survive completely intact for 65 million years no matter how you preserve it.
Mosquitoes trapped in amber wouldn't be great sources of DNA - it would have still decomposed over time. Not in the "something ate it" sense of the word, but in the "radioactive particles" sense of the word. So the DNA would be there, but fragmented. Analyzing one strand of complete, non-fragmented strand of DNA was an Epic undertaking. Doing it with hundreds of strands that were chopped into pieces is probably beyond our capabilities. We could also get this DNA from red blood cells found in a T-rex fossil recently, or just from grinding up the core of bones for *really* tiny bits.
Next, you can't just patch DNA in a dinosaur with DNA from a reptile. It just doesn't work that way, and birds are closer relatives anyway if it *did* work that way.
And then you'd have to somehow put together a DNA molecule. We can't do that yet. I'm totally serious, we can't. We can manipulate pieces maybe 10 or so genes long in existing DNA, but I don't think we could piece billions of genes long strands together from a blueprint even given all the time in the world.
Finally, you'd need a viable dinosaur egg. You can't just pick someone else's egg and stick dino DNA in it, eggs are highly specialized. You might get away with something as similar as elephant-mammoth but there just isn't anything *like* a dinosaur, nothing *near* close enough for a viable egg.
If by some miracle you managed to find full dino DNA, sequence the DNA, assemble the DNA, and put them in an artificial egg that worked... you'd have to do a thousand trials before you could say with any certainty you'd messed something up to make it fail instead of just having bad luck. So don't worry about Jurassic Park happening anytime soon.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
Chicken.
If there's a castle floating upside down in the sky, then there's a castle floating upside down in the sky.
"a hadrosaur's backside was about 25 percent larger than previously thought."
So, its a J-Lo-asaur ?
Or perhaps a Bodonkadonkasaur?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
That would be theoretically hard.
With the mosquitoes technique you'll find in the end several fragment of DNA per mosquitoe, with no way to know if they come from the same dino or if its contaminent from the mosquitoe.
In the end you may have a very large library containing lots of sequence fragment. The building of this library would require a lot of money and time and won't have any direct benefit (= few would like to fund it).
Then you would unleash bio informaticians to start mining the database, trying to sort the fragments and seeing which could fit which other.
Only now could you get :
- Comparison between the archeological fragment and modern sequence (Useful to understand how proteins evolved over time) ( - Warning, not fundie-compatible studies. May not get financed in conservative USA states)
- Comparison of the fragments with already built phylogenetic modern trees (idem).
But given then "fragment" nature of the database on one hand and due to the repetition and sequence similarity inside a single genome on the other hand, you may not have enough information to sort a complete genome or even sort the fragments across severl species.
That why the fictional Jurassic Park book used a lot of sequence of modern day species to help align the fragments and patch the holes.
As a comparison there an actual experiment that picked up a lot of sample of sea water and sequenced whatever it managed to find inside. We end up with a lot of fragments but not much help to know wich sequence comes from what specie. This database is very hard to interpret. A dinosaur mosquitoe database would be similarily complex.
At least trying to find squences in fossilised soft tissue could make you believe that most of the few sequence you can manage to take out come from the same animal. But once again you'll get a lot of small sequence fragments that will be hard to put together.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Condi, of course.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Tastes like chicken!
In a related story, Harland Sanders, a spokesman for an unnamed company, said he would be presenting the University of Manchester Dept. of Paleontology with a one billion dollar donation for the study of the recently unearthed soft tissue fossil. "This is a very important find that must be studied without concern for cost." stated the honorary Colonel from Kentucky. "I mean, look at the size of those drumsticks!"
Question does this mean that McRib is back?
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