First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber (nationalgeographic.com)

The tail of a beautiful, feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber from Myanmar. It is a huge breakthrough that could help open a new window on the biology of a group that dominated Earth for more than 160 million years. From a report on the National Geographic: The semitranslucent mid-Cretaceous amber sample, roughly the size and shape of a dried apricot, captures one of the earliest moments of differentiation between the feathers of birds of flight and the feathers of dinosaurs. Inside the lump of resin is a 1.4-inch appendage covered in delicate feathers, described as chestnut brown with a pale or white underside. CT scans and microscopic analysis of the sample revealed eight vertebrae from the middle or end of a long, thin tail that may have been originally made up of more than 25 vertebrae. NPR has a story on how this amber was found. An excerpt from it reads: In 2015, Lida Xing was visiting a market in northern Myanmar when a salesman brought out a piece of amber about the size of a pink rubber eraser. Inside, he could see a couple of ancient ants and a fuzzy brown tuft that the salesman said was a plant. As soon as Xing saw it, he knew it wasn't a plant. It was the delicate, feathered tail of a tiny dinosaur.

Comments

Re:Jurassic Park?

[silentcoder]

To be fair, when Chrighton wrote the original book 24-odd years ago, it was NOT 'science fiction' - it was definitely viable science based on the knowledge of the day. Amber was known to preserve soft-tissue, mosquitos and other blood-sucking insects from the dinosaur era had been found in amber and DNA had been recovered from amber.
It seemed entirely within the realm of what would be possible in the next few years.

In the intervening period a few things happened:
1) It was found that the DNA from the original species in the amber decayed
2) The human genome project was completed -and came with a massively shocking discovery: human DNA was far simpler than that of animals we'd genotyped years earlier like frogs (indeed - an order of magnitude fewer genes), which when we had to explain how that's possible turned our entire view of how DNA works upside down. The current view is that DNA is not a blueprint for a species, but a set of instructions for building a member of one - which makes assumptions. The more advanced the species is, the more assumptions can be made and the fewer conditionals have to be specified in the code. It's like stripping off the 'if arch == x86' part of your code because nobody uses a 32-bit computer anymore. Frogs have DNA to repond to various temperature ranges, humity levels etc. etc. basically to adjust the growth of the fetus to the ever-changing conditions in the pond all the time. Humans have a womb with very fixed conditions - so none of those are needed.
3) With this realization - we actually genotyped the DNA recovered from amber - and it turned out to be from (much later) external contamination (mostly bacterial DNA).

Those things shifted the Jurassic park scenario firmly into the science fiction region - but one should be fair to a brilliant writer with some pretty solid scientific credentials (in the field of medicine), when it was written it was in the realm of highly conceivable science fiction.
He also updated his writing to reflect changes in the field. His last book "Timeline" also deals with genetics - and is set firmly in the areas of genetics where active research is happening right now, and dealing with the (very significant) social and legal questions that is raised by such ridiculous concepts as allowing companies to patent genes.