T. Rex Protein Analysis Supports Dinosaur-Bird Link 242
LanMan04 writes "For the first time, researchers have read the biological signature of a Tyrannosaur — a signature that confirms the increasingly accepted view that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. Analyzing the organic material (collagen protein) found inside the unique fossil linked the collagen to several extant species. The bottom line is that the T. rex's biological signature was most like a bird's, at least based on the first fragmentary data. "It looks like chicken may be the closest among all species that are present in today's databases for proteins and genomes," one of the scientists interviewed said."
Re:Speaking of Jurassic Park... (Score:3, Insightful)
Argh, bad science reporting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of Jurassic Park... (Score:5, Insightful)
The curious thing that birds, dinosaurs and mammals all have in common is the placement of the legs underneath the body. This is what made it possible for dinosaurs and mammals to get so big. Other lizards are stuck with their legs sticking out to the sides, which limits weight-bearing capacity and means the really big ones are primarily aquatic.
What makes this curious is that this particular innovation appears to have only evolved once in some common ancestor of mammals and dinosaurs. This suggests it must be very unlikely to evolve--much less likely than other things like wings and eyes, which have evolved independently many times. Maybe the early fossil record will eventually show that it in fact arose more than once, but it's such a huge advantage that if it were possible to get it easily one would think that it would be done more often, and it is odd that no other reptile has ever pulled it off.
Re:Speaking of Jurassic Park... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Speaking of Jurassic Park... (Score:1, Insightful)
mmm... whales, whale sharks, about a half dozen eels, angler fish, starfish, manta rays and a whole lot of other animals are all slow, ungainly hunters. there's a trade-off between size and speed, and you need a pretty impressive metabolism to have both.
Re:That makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Scientists have LONG SUSPECTED that Birds and Dinosaurs were the closest relatives....if you just look at the skeletal structures modern birds are the closest living thing to the fossil records we have and birds are the only place that scientists find several unique characteristics of the dinosaur bone structures.
This just provides a little DNA evidence to back up the fairly obvious visual/structural similarities between birds and dinos.
Re:Did Someon Call the Skeptic? (Score:2, Insightful)
In order to succeed you'd have to also undermine all science, from physics to biology, via geology, chemistry, mathematics, paleontology, tectonics, astronomy, etc.
So yes, you'd deserve to be branded as a nut. Which type of nut is a trivial detail.
Re:Did Someon Call the Skeptic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because normal Christian nuts are quite happy to accept that God created Evolution, and the Bible is not a science text book. On account of the incontravertible evidence
All the nonsense you are sprouting..... (Score:3, Insightful)
And later on by astronomers, geophysicists, climatologists, geneticists, etc, etc, etc, for crying out loud.
The science of compared anatomy isn't that new either, but by the nonsense you ejaculate one would suspect all the disciplines above are pulling all the millons of years of natural phenomena out of their un-skeptical asses, you would want us to forget they arrived to similar conclussion by different, independent observations.
You would like us believe that the "evolutionists" are a weird group of people that wish to trick us into some beliefs that are completely esoteric. I have got news for you: many different scientific fields are supporting the conslussions of evolutionary theory. The body of evidence is so overwhelming that I can't believe I still have to write rebuttals to put to shame the uninformed, baseless opinions of evolution deniers.
Even John Paul II, Pope of the Catholic Church (the biggest and most important Christian denomination in the world) stated that Evolution is more than a theory,
As for anybody expressing doubts about the process of evolution by means of natural selection I would class them as nuts plain and simple, their religion or political affilitaion is of no interest to me. If they tend to be religious fundamentalists with fascist tendencies (they would love to impose into all of us their world view) it is purely incidental.
Re:Did Someon Call the Skeptic? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps because human made devices have no way of reproducing themselves with a chance of modification.
Re:Source of protein (Score:3, Insightful)
As for petrification, that doesn't necessarily require millions of years. A couple dozen thousand years ought to do, which completely jibes with how old our species is.
The problem with this world-wide flood theory is that it wouldn't have stratified the fossils into coherent layers that have certain species appearing in the same layer many times over the globe without appearing in other layers. That just doesn't make sense. And how would the coherency of the various dating techniques factor in. That data matches the layer data, and life that we know to exist at certain times, doesn't exist at other times. This is as we would expect from millions of years of evolution and extinction, but not what we would expect from a giant flood. And just where did all that floodwater go?
Um, as for the data you requested, I'm sure your nearest major university would be happy to comply if were to provide a stack of terabyte harddrives. The giant shitload of data we have from over the past couple of hundred ought to take you a couple of decades to pour over. Come back when you've educated yourself.
Re: nice (Score:3, Insightful)
And why does that unevidenced designer use the same solution to similar problems sometimes, but very different solutions to similar problems at other times? Answer: "that's what he wanted to do". Any observation is compatible with the claim that an all-powerful Creator did it on a whim. Thus the claim is utterly useless as a way of understanding the nature of the universe.
And experience shows that no amount of accumulated evidence will convince someone who is unwilling to give up on their ancient religious mythology.