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Signs of Ancient Cells and Proteins Found In Dinosaur Fossils
sciencehabit writes: The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 15-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week's issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed.
I, for one, welcome our giant drumstick-bearing, chicken-flavored overlords.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I totally read that in a southern US accent.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Cue young earth creationists claiming this dinosaur was intelligently designed 5000 years ago.
Sigh.
Some of them already claim that soft tissue discoveries proved that dinosaurs were recent. IIRC it was listed in the "creationist rigs search results" article a week or two ago.
Of course, there's a pending religious schism between those who claim all the dinos died in the flood, those who claim that they were saved by Noah and died later, and those who say they never existed at all (the fossils being planted by God to make sure no eviloutionists believe the bible).
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Considering that birds are considered avian dinosaurs (the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct), it's a good bet that they (dinos) do taste like chicken.
But you're going to need two strong arms to lift that drumstick!
-- Alastair
Or, that there is an entirely different option: we've been getting Genesis wrong due to approaching it with the wrong worldview (The Lost World of Genesis One, John H Walton). I don't hear this being talked about much, even though it really does seem to be a good way to link "believing the Bible" and accepting science (i.e. it makes most of the points of contention disappear), and I think being able to find some common ground between the two sides of the debate would be good. I am a little concerned though that my hope of "let's consider all ideas, even if they disagree with what we previously thought" is too courageous a position to expect, so this very thoughtful book might get missed by those who most need to read it (defenders of Creationism)...
Sure dinos were intelligently designed... by an agentless, iterative, massively parallel, DNA-based world-spanning supercomputer. Just because an intelligent system is smart doesn't mean it has intentions, goals, or a human-like "self".
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
In prehistoric Russia, drumsticks eat you!
Cue young earth creationists claiming this dinosaur was intelligently designed 5000 years ago.
Why do you even bring it up? You honor the creationists too much by acknowledging their existance, and you help their cause by simplifying and slightly misinterpreting their (enormously flawed) arguments, thereby giving them the chance to come back with a "correction" of your post, while completely ignoring science (again).
On the other hand, not even all modern birds in the same family taste the same (for example, chicken vs. turkey). BTW, does anyone else find it kind of odd that it just worked out such that one family (Phasianidae) contains almost all of the commonly eaten birds (chicken, turkey, pheasant, quail, grouse, ptarmigan, peafowl, etc) except for the waterfowl, their less commonly hunted but still regionally popular relatives are in the same order (Galliformes), and waterfowl - the remainder of the commonly eaten birds - make up the other half of the same superorder (Galloanserae)? That superorder only contains 440 of the world's ~17000 living bird species. Apparently evolution did something along that line that humans decided equals "tasty, convenient, and morally acceptable". And apparently it did that all the way back in the cretaceous, because this superorder has been distinct for that long - the "food birds" / "fowl" branched off from the other avian dinosaurs while there were still tyrannosaurs and velociraptors roaming about.
BTW, alligators/crocodiles just barely miss out on being called dinosaurs in most definitions, and any definition that would lump pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, etc in with dinosaurs would also lump in alligators / crocodiles. They're birds' closest living relatives, both descended from the archosaurs.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
They want their headline back. Mary Schweitzer already made the same discovery in 1993, and she's been fighting for more than 2 decades to get her findings past the "consensus" that such long preservation was impossible. It seemed like she had gotten her findings verified again by 2000 but I guess it's still only now becoming generally accepted. Really unfortunate it can still take that long for a major discovery to become accepted.