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.

Comments

Maybe we can clone us some dinosaurs

[penguinoid]

I, for one, welcome our giant drumstick-bearing, chicken-flavored overlords.

Re:Cue creationists

[Black Parrot]

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).

Re:Cue creationists

[captainpanic]

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).

Re:Snakes taste like chickens

[Rei]

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.