Scientists Find Soft Tissue in T-Rex Fossil

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."

News!

[razmaspaz]

Now this is news. I know we are not gonna get any cool theme parks out of this, but this is pretty cool stuff.

Promising for archaeology

[skwirl42]

It'll be interesting to see if we can find hominid remains in similar states of preservation, so we can learn more about the layout of our evolutionary tree. Then again, a T-Rex bone is huge, and that may be the only reason it managed to keep anything preserved.

Re:Jurassic Park

[Max Threshold]

What if they added bits and pieces of DNA to that of other animals, gradually creating a species that is more and more like a T-Rex? Eventually, they would have a creature that could carry a pure T-Rex embryo.

Metabolism

[praedictus]

I wonder if this soft tissue will give us some clues about the metabolism of T-Rex, namely will it reveal whether it was warm or cold blooded, or something in between. I must admit this is surprising news.

Possible viruses?

[PornMaster]

I'm a little concerned about the possible viruses which may have been dormantly sitting in this soft tissue all along. Who knows what they might be/do?

Young earth

[rkcth]

Is this proof of a young earth?

Crazy sounding 'but hear me out' prediction

[Chairboy]

First, I think we'll definately see cloned dinosaurs, mammoth, etc within out lives. What I think will surprise people will be the economic pusher for this.

Sure, researchers will pioneer the basic technology, but the people who do the large scale cloning won't be theme park owners, scientists, or preservationists.

They'll be food producers.

We're at the top of the foodchain, and foods like Fugu (deadly blowfish), sushi, and... well, many asian dishes, prove that we're running out of new stuff to eat. There are amazing strides being made by cooks, and there are only so many things people can try before they die of old age, but more and more people are getting adventuresome and want to eat things that nobody else has.

Enter: The brontoburger.

Who here hasn't salivated at the thought of carving into a big old dinosaur steak? Who here can forget the longing eyes they cast on Fred Flintstone's car as it tipped over under the weight of the massive dino-ribs he had just ordered?

Predictions:
1. Herbivores of various types will be bred in captivity for their meat and leather.
2. The rich will beat a path to their doorstep for the exclusivity of eating prehistoric food.
3. In an almost defiant gesture of the universe, the meat will undoubtedly taste like chicken. Dinosaurs are, after all, big ol' birds by most reckoning.

You may laugh now, but when you're cleaning the last bit of Tony Romas Olde Fashioned Allosaurus (like grandpa used to make 'em) Ribs, remember where you heard it first. Or second, or whenever this message drifted across your desk.

A theory

[n1ywb]

Fossilization is the process of minerals replacing proteins. It requires a wet environment, which is why you usually find fossiles in sedementary rocks that used to be a swamp or mud on the bottom of the ocean or something. Soooooo

1. Dino dies in swamp
2. Bone begins to fossilize from outside in
3. Swamp dries out before fossilization is complete
4. Crunchy on the outside, chewey on the inside

Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park...

[opec]

As much as I trust TV and the essentially random guesses made by people about something that has been dead for millions of years,

The detail about T-Rex's having the inability to see moving objects was thrown in by Michael Crichton to support his belief that scientists' filling in the ancient dinosaur DNA gaps with modern-day amphibian DNA would lead to various "features" being transposed across the species. Some amphibians of today truly cannot see inanimate objects.

This was a necessary plot point in the story... Jurassic Park was designed to continue only with Human support (no natural breeding), but "nature found a way" when the abilities of some amphibians to spontaneously change sexes was found in the JP dinosaurs.

To recap, it wasn't a random guess... Just a plot twist by a clever author. There's no evidence to suggest that ancient dinosaurs couldn't see inanimate objects. Predators like T-Rex's probably couldn't survive like that.

Re:What about X-rays or MRI first

[Anonymous Coward]

MRI is sensitive to hydrogen, and more so in liquids/soft materials rather than hard solids. It seems likely that MRI could easily distinguish between fossilized and soft tissue. There are a number of portable [nmr-mouse.de] MRI instruments available so this would have been a good option.

You can't

[SimianOverlord]

You'd have to demonstrate a use. There's a lot of companies who patented huge swathes of the human genome who are having those patents methodically overturned when it was discovered that 1)they didn't know what they were patenting and 2) they had no use for it then, anyway.

Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park...

[Ark42]

Birds too, I believe, cannot see things that do not move, and birds are believed to be whats left of dinosours as they evolved to today.
I've read that if it were possible for a human to control the natural eye jitteriness and just focus absolutely still, the image you see would fade away to nothing. The eye needs constant movement to be able to keep updating what you are seeing.

Re:But how?

[mnmn]

Its likely the soft tissue of bugs, bacteria and insects, which dined on the soft tissue of other bugs and insects, which dined on the Rex. Unless the bones were sunk in formaldehide of some sort.

They'll likely clone cockroaches instead.

I think humans and mammoths will be cloned before any dinos. I'm looking forward to wild mammoths though, Canada has plenty of space for that.

Crack open more bones?

[sahonen]

The scientist in the article wants more scientists to start cracking open their own T-rex bones to see if they have soft tissue inside as well. I'm wondering, isn't there a way to tell what's inside *apart* from cracking open precious bones? Ultrasound, or an MRI, maybe?

Re:Crazy sounding 'but hear me out' prediction

[Fear the Clam]

Not a chance. Those giant ribs at the drive-through always make my car tip over.

But seriously, the only lizard-like thing I've eaten is alligator and it's tasteless and tough. Sure, you can pound 'em out like a cheap steak and cover them with cajun spices, but what's the point?

Can they more accurately date the dinosaur now?

[Bun]

Perhaps they can use potassium-40 dating, or some other method to directly measure the age of the soft tissue, rather than the traditional method of estimating age by the surrounding rock.

100,000 Years...

[solanum]

is approximately when DNA becomes junk. It doesn't matter whether you can extract DNA or not, because even under ideal conditions DNA degrades so anything you manage to recover will be nonsensical and useless. We will never, repeat never, be able to clone anything as old as T. rex.
Jurasic Park and the idiot that wrote it have a lot to answer for when it comes to my annoyance and stress levels!

Re:See the MSNBC write-up

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how the article starts with

"70-million-year-old fossil yields preserved blood vessels"

totally discarding this new discovery as relative to calculating it's age.

Re:So...

[curtoid]

You were there, were you? Maybe you can explain something to me. How long was the first day? Where did the building materials come from? Doesn't it take crazier faith if you claim the universe spontaneoulsy came into existence and assembled itself in such a way as to have intelligent life, without containing the intelligence in the first place? (i.e. Things getting more organized over time into complex biological systems all by themselves). That flies in the face of the law of entropy, which says basically that stuff left to itself gradually falls apart and becomes more disorganized and more random over time. It takes effort to keep things running.

Try Again.

Re:Precedent

[mapmaker]

Yeah, you gotta wonder. Especially since the article goes on to say:

Usually paleontologists put preservatives on fossils right away, but Schweitzer has been trying to find soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, so this one was left alone.

Re:You can't

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't patented your genome, they've patented the methods for isolating that particular gene. Of course unless we find some radically new means of extracting genes, they've pretty effectively sewn up any clinical use of that gene.

Re:Peat Bogs

[sbma44]

Radioactive materials certainly occur naturally, and there are indeed cases of naturally-occuring nuclear reactors.

Only one, I believe.

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.

Could biological material really be kept irradiated enough to reliably cook bacteria for millions of years, but not get denatured itself? I guess anything's possible -- this could be a well-done dino -- but I'd happily take any bets tendered that radiation didn't have anything to do with this.

Re:Precedent

[jdgreen7]

And, she's kinda cute [64.233.167.104], too.

Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park...

[digidave]

I believe you're misunderstanding this aspect of vision. Inanimate objects don't disappear, it's just nearly impossible to notice it. It's like when you see something out of the corner of your eye... you can only identify a moving object if it's at any distance. However, any movement in the corner of your eye will be extremely noticable.

Take when you're driving, for instance. A car driving at the same speed as you in your blind spot is going to be hard to see when you turn your head before changing lanes. This is especially true of dark grey cars that can look similar to the road. If that car is moving either quicker or slower than you, then you can easily see it.

Re:Jurassic Park

[InternationalCow]

Nice idea, that with the egg, but it will not work. Looks like most organisms require so-called maternal effect genes (Fruit flies do, nematodes do, and if they do, we usually do, too) for proper initial embryonic development. While these genes are usually highly conserved, I doubt whether the Ostrich/Monitor/Your_fav_reptile will have the proper set of maternal effect genes that have enough T-Rex sequence in them left to actually properly satisfy fore and aft (to begin with). And then there's a whole bunch of even more esoteric genetic reasons why this will not work. Don't get me started. If you do, I'll ramble on for several pages.

Re:You can't

[susano_otter]

I dunno. People patent implentations and applications of the Simple Machines all the time, but we don't run around screaming, "they're taking away our Inclined Planes and Levers!"

I could see DNA ending up in the same situation, patent-wise.

(Reference [fi.edu])

Re:Jurassic Park

[Spetiam]

Namely, DNA breaks down at a relatively steady rate, and after 150 million years, you don't have many long runs of it left intact.

The breakdown you are referring to happens when the cells split to form new cells. If the cells aren't multiplying, the DNA's not breaking down. (At least not by the mechanism in question.)

Dinosaurs lived in a higher oxygenated world.

[Steve Mitchell]

One problem, even if it were feasible to clone a T-Rex (which mostly likely it isn't) there is the tiny fact that dinosaurs at the time lived in a higher oxygenated atmosphere. This made it possible for them to grow as large as they did.

-Steve

Re:Thank god for Jurassic Park...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes me think of when I spotted an actual tiger "going for a walk" outside a restaurant one lunch hour.

After figuring out the tiger was on 1/8" aircraft cable (hard to see from a distance), I found the owner and went to chat with him.

The tiger travelled with a stripper to various clubs. As the tiger approached, the owner assured me that if I just squatted down I could pet the tiger.

I ended up with a 500lb(?) tiger setting its head on my shoulder looking for a ear rub.

While enjoyable and definitely an experience to remember, when the tiger took it's last step towards me I thought I was going to become lunch and the urge to run was almost unbearable.

It also occurred to me if I did run I probably would be kitty chow.

Re:Seems like a good idea, but...

[orgelspieler]

obligitory wiki link [wikipedia.org]