Scientists Find Soft Tissue in T-Rex Fossil 978
douglips writes "Reuters is running a story about a shocking development in paleontology: A T-Rex thigh bone fossil was reluctantly broken to fit in a transport helicopter, and inside soft tissue was found. It appears to include blood vessels and bone cells. Scientists hope to isolate proteins, and perhaps even DNA."
Precedent (Score:5, Informative)
Of course getting actual DNA from these tissues will be a long shot due to its fragile nature, but protein sequence may prove very informative in letting us define exactly where genetic lineages have gone over evolution.
Re:Steven Spielberg? (Score:1, Informative)
MSNBC has pictures of the meat (Score:5, Informative)
in my professional paleontological opinion (not), it needs a nice marinade
fre up the BBQ, lets see what T Rex tastes like
nytimes too (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Informative)
>
>does it taste like chicken?
Considering that birds are the distant descendants of dinosaurs, and considering that the article [newscientist.com] someone else referred to describes traces of proteins from 70M-year-old eggs as bearing "strong similarities to proteins from chicken eggs.", I'd bet good money that the answer is probably "yes".
The dino in the NewScientist article was a herbivore, and T. Rex was either a carnivore or carrion-eater; so maybe it'll taste more like eagle or vulture.
Personally, I've never eaten eagle or vulture. Anyone know wha-yeah, I figured as much. Chicken.
Re:Uh oh. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about X-rays or MRI first (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Precedent (Score:5, Informative)
This T-Rex tissue is apparently a bigger deal than the fossilized egg contents she found previously though. From TFA:
"Preservation of this extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen in a dinosaur before." Feathers, hair and fossilized egg contents yes, but not truly soft tissue.
Methods of Soft Tissue Preservation (Score:5, Informative)
Soft part preservation - Soft tissues are preserved only under exceptional conditions. Examples include preservation of Siberian Mammoths (freezing in permafrost), Pleistocene cave faunas and older mummified remains (dessication), and insects and small animals preserved in lithified tree sap (amber). Soft parts can also be preserved after being replaced by minerals.
Original hard parts - Resistant materials such as calcium, silica, and calcium phosphate are sometimes preserved as original hard parts in shells, bones, and teeth.
Recrystallized hard parts - It is common, however, for original hard parts to be altered during diagenesis and after lithification. Unstable minerals such as aragonite will recrystallize to a more stable form such as calcite. Mineral crystals within an organism's hard parts my regrow to become larger and consolidated. Often recrystallization destroys fine, internal detail within a fossil.
Carbonization - Organic-laden hard parts and soft parts can be preserved as a thin film of organic carbon. This occurs when the organic material is preserved undecayed through burial. As heat increases throughout burial the volitile components of the organic material (N, O, H, and S) are driven off leaving a thin film of black carbon behind.
Replacement - Chemical reactions that occur during diagenesis can result in the molecule by molecule replacement of mineral for mineral or mineral for organic tissue. Replacement can often preserve exquisite detail in fossils.
Silicification - replacement of calcite by silica.
Pyritization - replacement of calcite or soft tissues with pyrite
Phosphatization - replacement of low phosphate apatite with high phosphate apatite.
Permineralization - Porous organic structures such as wood and bone are often preserved by the mineral infilling of the pore spaces. A common way of 'petrifying' wood and dinosaur bone.
Source [hofstra.edu]
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It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues. I googled this phenomenon and there seems to be a rather broad definition for "soft tissue". Soft Tissue, it appears, can be preserved in many ways (see above). I'm curious as to how this tissue survived micro-organisms, mineralization/calcification, carbonization, or simply, or even dehydration. How was it able to remain soft enough to be squeezed?
See the MSNBC write-up (Score:5, Informative)
Peat Bogs (Score:5, Informative)
In this case, the acidity is unlikely to be a factor, but the totally anaerobic conditions may be. It is possible that any bacteria in the soft tissue simply didn't have what they needed in order to consume the organic material, and therefore didn't. A slight variant on the situation with peat, but essentially the same idea.
A second option - less likely, but possible - would be a variant on the way fresh produce is kept fresh today. Modern food isn't always kept with preservatives. Rather, the packaging company uses a medium blast from a radioactive caesium isotope. This kills off all of the bacteria present.
Radioactive materials certainly occur naturally, and there are indeed cases of naturally-occuring nuclear reactors. It is entirely within the realms of possibility that natural radioactivity kept the inside of the bones sterilized, so that organic decay could not take place.
The odds of that being the case are slim, but not quite none. However, it raises questions on what may be found in areas where such preservation techniques may actually have occured.
Re:Young earth? (Score:3, Informative)
Picture of dissolved bone here: (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park... (Score:4, Informative)
False. How else would birds find their water bowl, or their perch? Snakes cannot see things that move, birds obviously can.
At the level of the first layers in the retina, the firing rate of neurons is proportional to the rate of change in either direction, colour, intensity or time.
As an example, stare at this flag [softwaresolutions4u.net] for 30 seconds or so, then look at a blank area of space. This optical illusion works because the neurons that respond to yellow, green and black become inactive, leaving blue, red and white.
I am sure birds can see things that do not move, it is only that they do not consider something that moves slowly as "dangerous". It is a great party trick when we were kids to go out in the garden, place some grain in our hands, stand absolutely still and have wild birds eat of our hands. Obviously the birds could see our hands and the grain.
From some various articles on bird vision, birds may have up to 120,000 cones per square inch of retina (humans only have 10,000), and may have four or more different types of colour-sensitve cones (thereby being able to have a higher colour range than humans).
What Yahoo News doesn't mention (Score:5, Informative)
"Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, cautions
that looks can deceive: Nucleated protozoan cells have been found in
225-million-year-old amber, but geochemical tests revealed that the
nuclei had been replaced with resin compounds. Even the resilience of
the vessels may be deceptive. Flexible fossils of colonial marine
organisms called graptolites have been recovered from
440-million-year-old rocks, but the original material--likely
collagen--had not survived."
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:3, Informative)
Good idea, but the closes living relative would be a bird. Ostrich egg, perhaps.
Tor
Biblical dinosaurs (Score:2, Informative)
the BIBLE talks about dinosaurs. they are specifically mentioned in the early books of the bible.
Specifically, many Christian creationists believe that tanniyn (translated "dragon"), b@hemowth ("behemoth" or "brachiosaur") and livyathan ("leviathan" or "kronosaur") were Hebrew names for dinosaur-sized creatures, as explained here [clarifying...ianity.com].
Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park... (Score:3, Informative)
I came across this years ago... had to drag out an old psychology book to find a reference.
Look for: Stabilized images on the retina by R. M. Pritchard
I found an associated study [nih.gov]... and this article [hhmi.org]. But, could not find the real deal [nih.gov] freely available.
Basically they attached a projector to a contact lens that was worn by the patient so that images could be projected into the eye yet remain in a constant position relative to the eye. (The were trying to eleminate "eye jitter".) The result was that the images were perceptible when introduced, but slowly "faded" away and disappeared.
followup (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Precedent (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Young earth (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, using logic isn't the strong suit of the ID\Young Earth\Creationism set anyway, so I fully predict those guys will show up here in force with a bunch of "I told you so" posts, mostly with out actually reading TFA.
Oh, please.
I am not a Young Earth person myself, but the above argument does not deserve to be labelled "Insightful".
Rhibosomes (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park... (Score:2, Informative)
I have had a Blue and Gold Macaw for years, and I can tell you without hesitation that:
A: Birds CAN see inanimate objects
B: Birds CAN see in vivid color and can differentiate between even slightly different hues
C: Birds CAN tell the difference between real and artifical threats ( a real hawk half a mile away has him jittery and scared, where a hawk on a TV show or a picture in a book causes no panic at all )
D: Birds are extremely intelligent, eat a lot of food for their size and poop about every 10 minutes.
Actual News Release at NC State (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Jurassic Park (Score:5, Informative)
No, you've read something into my statement that I did not intend. And somehow gotten an "Insightful" mod for it - Kudos!
I refer to plain, ordinary entropy-obeying molecular breakdown. DNA slowly decays into less complex molecules over time, after the organism dies. IIRC, somewhere around 0.1% per millenium - Which sounds small but over the course of 150M years really adds up, making it pretty lucky to find evem a few thousand base pairs intact at a time.
Re:Let the cloning begin! (Score:3, Informative)
Mycroft
Re:Rhibosomes (Score:3, Informative)
mRNA codons (transcribed from DNA) code for the same amino acid almost universally. We only know of 15 exceptions, and these are generally minor single-nucleotide changes like: "AUA" coding for methionine in human mitochondria, not just "AUG". One of the reasons we feel all life evolved from the same cell of sludge in the primordial ooze is things like common amino acid coding.
Even when there is a change, it's the tRNA's job to match codons to amino acids, and the tRNA is transcribed from the DNA.
Unless T-Rex went down a very *VERY* different evolutionary path, his proteins will be coded by the same amino acids which will be coded by the same codons as essentially every lifeform on earth.
Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park... (Score:2, Informative)
Also, check out this link:
Rod/Cone Distribution [gsu.edu]
Re:So if a nesting magpie attacks you, stand still (Score:3, Informative)
By the same reasoning, humans live contemporaneously with primates (chimps, monkeys, etc.), and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
The religious folks do use this reasoning, usually by denying that humans are descended from chimps or monkeys. They are, strictly speaking, correct, since (contemporary) chimps and monkeys are not our ancestors. But we are primates; we share relatively recent common ancestors with other primates. Some of those common ancestors looked a lot like chimps (5 million years ago) or monkeys (20 million years ago). But they weren't (modern) chimps or (modern) monkeys, they were ancestral primates.
Similarly, tyrannosaurs were not ancestral to birds. But nobody claims that birds evolved from tyrannosaurs. The claim is that they shared a common ancestor (between 150 and 200 million years ago), and that ancestor was apparently a theropod dinosaur. It wasn't a tyrannosaur or bird; they hadn't evolved yet. The term "theropod" refers to a large branch of the dinosaur tree whose sub-branches include tyrannosaurs and birds.
It is pretty clear now from the fossil record that "birds are dinosaurs", in the same sense that "humans are primates" or "cattle are ungulates". In each case, there are still a lot of open question about the details of their evolutionary history. But the basic cladistic trees are fairly well determined.
Actually, the idea that birds are dinosaurs isn't new. It was proposed and discussed in the early 1800's. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize very well, so the usual scientific reaction was "That's interesting; can you find some more evidence?" Until the very recently, the only avian fossils from before the 65-million-year disaster were the 5 Archaeopterix fossils. Not much evidence. Then, around 1980, Chinese paleontologists discovered the Liaoning formations, full of fossils. This included the remains of lots of more birds and similar small dinosaurs. For several decades now, paleontologists have been going wild studying the confused, tangled mess of 120- to 180-million-year-old bones and trying to organize them into a consistent tree.
Of course, birds still don't fossilize very well. The debate over the details of their family tree is raging, and probably will continue for decades. But the rough outline is slowly emerging.
To learn a lot more, ask google about "Liaoning avian fossil". That'll get around 900 hits, which should keep you busy for a few weeks. Then omit the "avian", and you'll have months of' good reading on the general topic (17,700 hits right now), including the non-avian theropod dinosaurs with feather-like coverings.