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."

Comments

Question

[Major Blud]

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?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Dinosaurs can be big. Really big. I mean, you may think ...

Oh, wait, wrong analogy. Seriously though, the phrase that is most relevant to answering your question is in the article: "10-ton block", plus another 4 tons, which they whittled down to "only" 5 tons in total. This is not your usual fossil extraction task. It can take significant money and time to set up what is needed to excavate a find that big, you have to transport it, and you have to find a spot for it back in the lab after you do extract it. This is back-breaking, painstaking work, and getting together a big enough chain gang^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean group of volunteers to do the job isn't always easy, especially when there may be a dozen other sites in the region where excavations are already under way, and to which the resources you have are already allocated. So, sometimes a site gets marked with its GPS coordinates and hidden until the resources are available. Also, sometimes you have to start the excavation before you really realize the importance of what you have found. That seems to be the case for this specimen, based on the comments in the article. They didn't originally realize how special it was.

So, yeah, what you describe is common, especially in areas that are both remote and prolific, and especially for large dinosaur specimens. It can take years.

Re:Question

[osu-neko]

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?

I don't think it's a matter of being "passed by" as much as this is how long it takes with all available resources being devoted to it. This is the United States we're talking about -- basic science doesn't get funded unless there's a corporation that sees a potential for profit in it. :p

Re:Question

[Cedric Tsui]

According to an archeology professor of mine at Queen's University, this is very common. Excavation is a slow process, and one which is dependent on the weather. Furthermore, it is a funding intensive project.

You find a site, then you apply for funding. When you get your funding, you start the dig. Generally you only get the summer as rain, snow or ice can damage artifact and generally make digging harder. At the end of the digging season, you place some sort of modern marker at the edges and bottom of the trench (my professor used soda cans) and fill them in until the next time you can come back.

If your site proves to be interesting, you can get the funding renewed for another summer, and as a rule of thumb they give you funding every 2 years. This allows the funding to be spread out over a wider range of projects, and ensures the scientists have the time to publish what they found during the excavation.

North Dakota, Not South Dakota

[eldavojohn]

First line of the summary:

A fossilized hadrosaur has been uncovered in South Dakota that has preserved soft tissue. First line of the article:

A high school student hunting fossils in the badlands of his native North Dakota discovered an extremely rare mummified dinosaur that includes not just bones but also seldom seen fossilized soft tissue such as skin and muscles, scientists will announce today. For those of you who have not visited both North & South Dakota, I have. They are, in fact, not the same place. The submitter was probably confused as the belief that nothing comes from North Dakota is a well known fact. However, this news and fossil flies right in the face of that so I have to rework my post graduate thesis on black holes--it seems information can escape.

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!

Re:North Dakota, Not South Dakota

[gEvil (beta)]

Oh sure. Next I suppose you're going to try to convince us that there's a NEW Mexico. I'm not falling for that one again...

Re:North Dakota, Not South Dakota

[Jesus_666]

There was, in the early nineties. It didn't work out and they had to re-release Classic Mexico. It was the biggest failure of the North American nation industry until the Crystal Canada fiasco.

Well, damn

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:Well, damn

[nacturation]

Well what if we paid $999 for a complete DNA scan and sent it in?

No clone wars

[oboreruhito]

RTFA. There's no DNA; the fossilization process was fast enough to fossilize soft tissue. It's not organic material.

Although it is described as "mummified," the 65 million-year-old duckbilled dinosaur that scientists have named Dakota bears no similarity to the leather-skinned human mummies retrieved from ancient tombs in Egypt. Time long ago transformed Dakota's soft tissue into mineralized rock, preserving it for the ages.

"It's a dinosaur that was turned into stone, essentially," said Lyson, 24, now a graduate student in paleontology at Yale University.

Not real soft tissue

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Another great moment in science:

[martianred]

a hadrosaur's backside was about 25 percent larger than previously thought. That's... great. ... So when can we clone it already?

Dino DNA

[Raul654]

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.

Also In news: Dinosaur Saddle

[Anonymous Coward]

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

This has happened before

[Aqua OS X]

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

Was the dinosaur

[antifoidulus]

smashing a house when it died?

Also: Mammoth DNA

[Raul654]

Also, in case anyone missed it, a few months back, some researchers extracted enough woolly mammoth DNA from mammoth hairs to sequence it

Re:Also: Mammoth DNA

[tomatensaft]

Hey, I've got a business idea. What would you think if we would breed those mammoths as livestock and sell their meat (Delicious Mammoth Jerky?) and, of course, ivory! And sure enough, many zoos around the globe would want to buy one for their exhibits. That would probably save the elephants from extinction...

A quote from Dr. Malcom

[sexybomber]

1. God creates dinosaurs
2. God destroys dinosaurs
3. God creates man
4. Man destroys God
5. Man creates dinosaurs

Done before

[cthulu_mt]

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.

FTA?

[CarpetShark]

According to the FTA...

the Fucking Terranosaur Article?

Re:Jurassic Park?

[PieSquared]

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.

Large Backside ...

[Archangel Michael]

"a hadrosaur's backside was about 25 percent larger than previously thought."

So, its a J-Lo-asaur ?

Or perhaps a Bodonkadonkasaur?