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Soft Tissue Discovered In T-Rex Bone
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Oct 01, 2006 01:28 PM
from the tastes-like-ostrich dept.
from the tastes-like-ostrich dept.
kubla2000 writes, "Paleontologists have discovered soft tissue inside the fossilized thigh bone of a T-Rex. The tissue included blood vessels, bone cells, and perhaps even blood cells." From the article: "When paleontologists find fossilized dinosaur bones during a dig, they usually do everything in their power to protect them, using tools like toothbrushes to carefully unearth the bones without inflicting any damage. However, when scientists found a massive Tyrannosaurus rex thigh bone in a remote region of Montana a few months ago, they were forced to break the bone in two in order to fit it into the transport helicopter. This act of necessity revealed a startling surprise: soft tissue that had seemingly resisted fossilization still existed inside the bone. This tissue... was so well preserved that it was still stretchy and flexible."
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Welcome back! (Score:5, Funny)
*sigh*
Re:Welcome back! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Welcome back! (Score:4, Funny)
T-Rex: It's what's for dinner!
T-Rex-Bone steak anyone?
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Here's a BBQ for grilling T-Rex ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Welcome back! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Welcome back! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Welcome back! (Score:5, Funny)
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JURASSIC PARK! (Score:3, Funny)
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PLEASE don't tell Michael Chrichton! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory Jurrasic Park (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Obligatory Jurrasic Park (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDckbqhpW8 [youtube.com]
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Re:wow, youre under arrest! (Score:5, Funny)
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Can we pull the DNA and clone it? (Score:4, Funny)
duh (Score:5, Funny)
OLD Repost! (Score:5, Informative)
Credit: From Schweitzer et al., Science 307:1952-1955 (2005). Reprinted with permission from AAAS.
Geez!
Re:OLD Repost! (Score:5, Funny)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/
I'm looking forward to future news stories about the impending release of Windows 95 and the announcement of the Apple Mac's shift to the PPC platform from the m68k.
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Re:OLD Repost! (Score:5, Funny)
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19853
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14362
get's to use the exact same joke twice!
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Re:OLD Repost! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OLD Repost! (Score:5, Funny)
Fossilized Slashdot Headlines Presented As Fresh News
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes you wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's pretty much all that they can afford anyway. Paleontology is fairly underfunded worldwide since nobody really seems to care what lurks in fossil strata. No money in it you see...
"Tyrannosaur Canyon" (not Jurassic Park) (Score:3, Informative)
obvious question (Score:3, Funny)
You make soup out of bones? Get it? T-Rex soup? Sigh, evermind...
d'oh! don't touch it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps because their budget didn't allow for a bigger/different helicopter.
That is a serious answer.
Fossils straight out of the field are really heavy and a T-Rex thigh bone is really big.
You can't just strap that kinda weight to (one of) a helicopter's skids, assuming the helicopter had skids. Worse, most helicopters don't have weight bearing mounts for attaching nets to do a lift operation.
Or maybe t
"tissue in bone" (Score:3, Funny)
wtf? (Score:3, Insightful)
How is that a good reason?
Ob. Jurassic Park (Score:3, Funny)
Yes - but how did it SMELL? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the key point - surely? If it were rotten, then it would smell bloody awful (pun intended), and there'd by no chance of any DNA surviving. But what if it DID NOT smell awful? Surely that's an immediate indication of preservation?
And if it did NOT smell, you'd only have a TINY window of opportunity to perform tests on it - before oxygen started to do its oxidising thing.
Personally, I'd start placing bets with reputable gambling houses in the U.K. that a dinosaur will re re-constituted from ancestral DNA before 2050.
I'm reminded of the line by Dr. Malcolm;
"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming." See Signature.
Update: Soft Tissue Discovered In T-Rex Bone (Score:5, Interesting)
From their discovery they were able to determine the sex of the dinosaur whose remains they had found (something to do with the build up of the bone and the soft tissue) - it was female. They also found that the bone structure had concentric circles much like a tree and thus they were able to tell the age of the dinosaur at the time of it's death (which was 18yrs old).
In the end he concluded that we would not be able to re-construct a dinosaur solely from the DNA found in the red blood cells since only a few of the DNA strands were intact enough to do a proper analysis and since chicken DNA has about a million different DNA strands that we'd be a long way from making a real dinosaur... not to mention that we do not currently have the know how on how to convert DNA into a living organism!
Mod parent up Soft Tissue Discovered In T-Rex Bone (Score:4, Interesting)
Please to _not_ jump to the conclusion that DNA analysis will be futile. IMHO, quite the opposite.
In all liklihood, if we have ANY DNA available it will be a miracle. However if there is some, then the "some" will vary from cell to cell.
Thus if we map a large enough number of cells we can eventually build up the genome.
In seismic its called "stacking". You take a noisy blurry picture that you sample many times over and you "stack" it. The noise cancels. You are left with the picture.
Similarly, if you find any DNA at all, then if this is a fragment of what was in the cell to start with, and you have part of the picture.
These fragments will overlap and from these overlaps you will eventually be able to make perhaps even a complete picture. An example of this process is "diff" which most here will recognise as a programmers tool.
DNA is programming. Its molecular programming, but it is still programming.
What makes me quiver is the idea that we might be able to build up the DNA patterns by painstakingly replicating the DNA in each isolated cell and then stitching these DNA fragments together by matching the common parts of fragments found in different cells. It would be worse than putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the picture face down on the table... but it should be doable.
I suspect we will be able to tell that Dinos and Birds are, if not close cousins, then perhaps close 2nd cousins. In fact the birds by even be decendants. If decendants, then one would expect large amounts of dino DNA may still be found in bird DNA... and that it is just inactive or that its function is modified. The cell is a rather promiscous DNA xerox machine.
To go way out on a limb... if we can sequence the DNA and stitch it together, then we may be able to find living cells with a biochemistry close enough to Dino DNA that we can in fact make a working cell. Clearly we would be inserting artificial DNA into a cell. But it doesn't matter where the DNA comes from and how it came about - what matters is the proper sequence of DNA bases.
This is clearly along the idea that if you put enough monkeys in front of typewriters that they would create Shakespear's sonnets.
Well - the DNA stitching won't be random. The question is how much of the original picture is still preserved.
Every cell is a copy of every other cell in a given individual. As cells specialize they turn off some of the DNA. The DNA is still there.
Maybe some day we will actually be able to create a working Dino cell. Creataceous park... HERE WE GO!
Its an old story. I read the previous slashdot story last year. Probably our editors were bored on a Sunday morning and wanted to see if we would remember. Criticisms aside... your update is interesting.
So.. what progress has been made in the DNA studies?
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Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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When I tracked this on some debate forums, I saw some general debate about how petrification might happen quicker or slower than we cur
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Scientists never said C-14 dating was 100% accurate. Carbon-14 is formed in the atmosphere when cosmic radiation reacts with Nitrogen. The accuracy if carbo
Re:Oh Boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because there's no large group of people out there that actually believe Santa Claus exists, and are trying to force our children to be taught that "Clausology" is a scientific theory?
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Re:Oh Boy... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? Then who are all of those people I line up with every year to see him at the mall? HMM??? You've tried to put us down for years with all of your "facts" and "science," but we all know the truth.
Keep talking like that, mister, and you're going to find a lump of coal in your stocking this year...
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh Boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming both atheists and Christians indoctrinate their kids to the same degree is as ludicrous as claiming the same thing about, say, mainstream Christians and the Muslim parents who send their kids to madras schools. One doesn't have to have any particular religious persuasion to see that teaching kids a relatively complex narrative (the old and new testaments) requires more time and effort on the parts of parents than not teaching them the narrative.
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Re:Oh Boy... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh come on, nobody seriously questions the existence of Santa Claus. All of us gentile children receive very real, tangible evidence of his existence. This sets Santa Claus head and shoulders above characters like God, Jesus, the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the FSM (pasta be upon him!). We could debate whether or not there really is a Santa Clause, but it's really a moot question. The debate would serve no purpose in the face of overwhelming evidence of Santa's continued existence.
The more interesting argument, I think, is why Santa continues to hold to medieval beliefs about the inherent superiority of the children of the aristocracy. He continues to this day to give the children of wealthy parents higher value gifts and a higher overall average number of presents. Clearly he missed the bourgeois revolution.
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It depends on how it died.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:DNA (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this, RTFParagraph.
Does this discovery of soft dinosaur tissue mean that scientists will soon be able to clone a Tyrannosaurus rex? Probably not most scientists believe that DNA cannot survive for 70 million years. Then again, before this discovery, most scientists believed that soft tissue could not survive for 70 million years either.
This discovery has shown that "most scientists" can be wrong. So it's quite possible that they're wrong about how long DNA can last.
LK
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Re:soft tissue, no DNA? (Score:4, Informative)
By contrast, some organic molecules, such as collagen, are much more durable than DNA, and could plausibly survive much longer in the right conditions, such as if embedded in the minerals that form bone. This general fact has been known for a long [nih.gov]time [pnas.org] (those papers are from the 1960s and are both PDFs), though how old such remains might ultimately be found is still uncertain. Also, even if the organic molecules were severely degraded, it doesn't mean they vanish completely -- some degraded C-bearing organic residue might remain as long as it wasn't dissolved away, and it could still preserve the shape of the original tissues, even if it wasn't compositionally the same anymore.
Some organic molecules are extraordinarily durable and occur as fossils routinely. The sporopollenin that forms the cell wall of spores and pollen is like the "plastic garbage bag" of organic materials. It can survive multiple passages through the digestive system of animals, and still be intact. Fossil pollen and spores are often recovered from sedimentary rocks essentially unchanged, except for a bit of thermal alteration, and geologists use potent acids like concentrated HCl and HF to dissolve the minerals away, but the pollen and spores are untouched!
Finally, even if the organic molecules themselves get destroyed (e.g., it isn't, say, collagen anymore), minerals could precipitate in contact with the soft tissues and preserve their shape at microscopic scale. The soft tissue isn't actully there, but the structure is. Such preservation is rare, but is known for other types of soft tissues [www.exn.ca] in an older dinosaur (the linked example of the dinosaur Scipionyx does show soft-tissue structures, such as intestines, but they are all mineralized).
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's what I wondered [slashdot.org]... at the end of May, so it's old news now. And yes, I submitted it as a story, but it was rejected.
Btw, bye.