Fossilized Mosquito Has Blood-filled Abdomen 86
ananyo writes "Jurassic Park's iconic image of a fossilized blood-filled mosquito was thought to be fiction — until now. For the first time, researchers have identified a fossil of a female mosquito with traces of blood in its engorged abdomen. The fossilized mosquito contains molecules that provide strong evidence of blood-feeding among ancient insects back to 46 million years ago (paper abstract). The insect was found not in amber, as depicted in Jurassic Park, but in shale sediments from Montana. After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded."
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Vampires are demon based in cultural mythos going back to the Romans, and earlier.
In short, it was an ACCURATE take on Vampires.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, because the vampires on Buffy were all ugly, overweight, middle-aged men. Not a pretty or handsome teenager or 20-something in sight on that show.
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Ars (Score:5, Informative)
beyond time immemorial (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hominids have been splitting rocks for a couple of millions of years now.
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Challenge the impossible... (Score:5, Informative)
After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded.
That's what they used to say about Neandertal DNA. Turns out the DNA does indeed begin to fragment but you can still piece it together for a very long time after it begins to degrade. In this case that statement is it's probably right and 46 million years is too long and even if you could recover some Dino DNA (from any source) it will be fragmented beyond recovery with current technology. Even so, we should not stop trying to defy established notions of what is impossible. A Scientist at Yale University recently discovered that pigments do not degrade, they sometimes fossilise which is an amazing discovery since it means that if we find fossilised dinosaur skin, feathers or insect exoskeletons for that matter we can figure out what color long extinct animals were [scientificamerican.com]. It was almost a scientific axiom that we would never know what color dinosaurs were and it certainly blew me away when I found out that was wrong.
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Re:Challenge the impossible... (Score:4, Funny)
Just make sure you don't pick those frogs that can switch genders.
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Just make sure you don't pick those frogs that can switch genders.
They all can. Gender in amphibians and reptiles is largely determined by the ambient temperature of the eggs.
This is unlike mammals and birds where mostly predetermined by genetics (sex chromosome).
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That's probably chimerism. A male and female embryo fuse at an early stage and their cells end up in random places.
That's known to happen in humans too.
Once a bird/mammal starts out as a genetic male or female, it will develop into that (mostly, there are some hormonal imbalances possible).
Not so in fish/amphibians/reptiles, that start out as genetic male/female/undetermined but develop into a temperature determined gender (a higher temperature biases the male/female mix towards one of the two, usually male
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It's also too recent for dinosaurs.
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true but it is curious as to what kind of animal it dna of. While the earth would have restored itself. There were no dinosaurs, so i wonder what kind of creature that blood sucker liked to feed on.
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Eocene. The rapidly diversifying mammals would be ripe for sucking.
Re:Challenge the impossible... (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to Eocene Parkl! Enjoy our vaguely badger and rodent-looking things!
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This. It is basically like half-lives. There is still going to be something somewhere and given enough samples and enough time, there could be a lot of stuff that could easily be stitched together and filled in with other DNA that are known descendants of some of the smaller ones that survived.
Admittedly finding enough samples is the problem here, but we still haven't really truly dug deep in places where it likely could be hiding out, waiting to be found.
It is the Mars Problem, life, no life, we'd need t
Re:Challenge the impossible... (Score:5, Funny)
That's what they used to say about Neandertal DNA.
I'm hoping that the mosquito bit a pig. Then we could all be dining really soon . . . on . . . Jurassic Pork!
We already have enough Neandertaler still walking the face of the planet today . . .
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As one of the 'Black Irish', a possible descendant of H. Neandertalensis, I find your aspersions cast on my subspecies offensive! As an ambush, not endurance, hunter, I can probably out-think you on my worst day!
Why are you running away! *Cough* *Wheeze* STOP!
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work backwards (Score:1)
If any proteins are intact, you could work out their amino acid sequence and determine the gene encoding that produces it. It's not perfect, but it's better than giving up.
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Reconstruct that sequence. If the half-life of DNA really is ~500 years, then this message will be orders of magnitude easier to construct.
Re:work backwards (Score:4, Informative)
That was an easy one.
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Slashdot's "junk character" filter won't let me post this in the same format, so I'll have to do it this way:
-Twelve-letter word
-Three-letter word
-Four-letter word
-Four-letter word
-Eleven-letter word
-Four-letter word
-One-letter word
-Four-letter word
-Four-letter word
-Six-letter word
-Three-letter word
The last letter of the first word is "s."
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_ _ _ / _ r _ / _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Reconstruct that sequence. If the half-life of DNA really is ~500 years, then this message will be orders of magnitude easier to construct.
The/_r_/is/_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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The/_r_/is/_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
The ire is palpable?
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that wasn't too hard.
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The serendipic effects of fraccing (Score:1)
More such scientific discoveries will be made.
Fraccing is GOOD!
What a find.
Life... uh... (Score:2)
...finds a way.
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Fossilized Mosquito HAD Blood-filled Abdomen...
There. Fixed that for ya...
Clever girl...
Of all the things to go extinct... (Score:3)
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only recently man has done things with those species; the species from which the farm versions were bred had survived the evolutionary system
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You've seen the pictures of giant prehistoric dragonflies.
I, for one, am happy we don't have to deal with hordes of giant prehistoric mosquitoes.
Oh? (Score:2)
After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded
So you're sayin' there's a chance!
Degraded DNA (Score:2)
After 46 million years, however, any DNA would be long degraded."
No problem, That's where our geneticists take over. Thinking Machine supercomputers and gene sequencers break down the strand in minutes - - - - and Virtual Reality displays show our geneticists the gaps in the DNA sequence! Since most animal DNA is ninety percent identical, we use the complete DNA of a frog - - - - to fill in the - - holes and - -complete - - the - - - - code! Whew! Now we can make a baby dinosaur!
Too bad (Score:3)
That red blood calls generally don't have DNA.
Bummer, huh?
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Given that mosquitos drink whole blood, and not just red blood cells, you'd expect to find DNA-carrying cells in with any red blood cells. Of course it's moot because the traces they found were not cells.
Degraded DNA (Score:2)
The DNA is long degraded. That's disappointing I was looking forward to barbecuing up mastodon steaks.
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