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Fossilized Mosquito Has Blood-filled Abdomen
ananyo writes "Jurassic Park's iconic image of a fossilized blood-filled mosquito was thought to be fiction — until now. For the first time, researchers have identified a fossil of a female mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged abdomen. The fossilized mosquito contains molecules that provide strong evidence of blood-feeding among ancient insects back to 46 million years ago (paper abstract). The insect was found not in amber, as depicted in Jurassic Park, but in shale sediments from Montana. After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded."
Ars Technica had a great article on this matter.
Hominids have been splitting rocks for a couple of millions of years now.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded.
That's what they used to say about Neandertal DNA. Turns out the DNA does indeed begin to fragment but you can still piece it together for a very long time after it begins to degrade. In this case that statement is it's probably right and 46 million years is too long and even if you could recover some Dino DNA (from any source) it will be fragmented beyond recovery with current technology. Even so, we should not stop trying to defy established notions of what is impossible. A Scientist at Yale University recently discovered that pigments do not degrade, they sometimes fossilise which is an amazing discovery since it means that if we find fossilised dinosaur skin, feathers or insect exoskeletons for that matter we can figure out what color long extinct animals were. It was almost a scientific axiom that we would never know what color dinosaurs were and it certainly blew me away when I found out that was wrong.
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Fossilized Mosquito HAD Blood-filled Abdomen...
There. Fixed that for ya...
Clever girl...
...why not mosquitos?!!! The most vile, annoying creatures to ever to roam the earth!
The real bottom line is that we should be searching for cold spots, like Antarctic caves, with relict animal DNA that might average -57C (-70F). Then let's see how many million years we can drive DNA recovery.
You/are/an/imbecile
That was an easy one.
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Vampires are demon based in cultural mythos going back to the Romans, and earlier.
In short, it was an ACCURATE take on Vampires.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire
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That red blood calls generally don't have DNA.
Bummer, huh?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...