Signs of Ancient Cells and Proteins Found In Dinosaur Fossils 51
sciencehabit writes: The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 15-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week's issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed.
Snakes taste like chickens (Score:1)
I wonder what Dinosaur meat taste like ...
Who knows? The cloned dino might become our next meal?
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Could be. Just make sure you buy a gun to take care of the business.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... [washingtonpost.com]
In all seriousness, I wonder if it may some day be possible to piece together the few remaining codons (usually remaining in sequences of a hundred or less) using some kind of avian as a broader template without using it to fill in any gaps. Definitely don't use frog DNA to fill in the gaps, because as a 90's documentary has shown us, the "dinosaurs" end up looking more like reptiles than dinosaurs, that and
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Yaba daba doo!
Re:Snakes taste like chickens (Score:4, Funny)
Considering that birds are considered avian dinosaurs (the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct), it's a good bet that they (dinos) do taste like chicken.
But you're going to need two strong arms to lift that drumstick!
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In prehistoric Russia, drumsticks eat you!
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Wilma!
Re:Snakes taste like chickens (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, not even all modern birds in the same family taste the same (for example, chicken vs. turkey). BTW, does anyone else find it kind of odd that it just worked out such that one family (Phasianidae) contains almost all of the commonly eaten birds (chicken, turkey, pheasant, quail, grouse, ptarmigan, peafowl, etc) except for the waterfowl, their less commonly hunted but still regionally popular relatives are in the same order (Galliformes), and waterfowl - the remainder of the commonly eaten birds - make up the other half of the same superorder (Galloanserae)? That superorder only contains 440 of the world's ~17000 living bird species. Apparently evolution did something along that line that humans decided equals "tasty, convenient, and morally acceptable". And apparently it did that all the way back in the cretaceous [wikipedia.org], because this superorder has been distinct for that long - the "food birds" / "fowl" branched off from the other avian dinosaurs while there were still tyrannosaurs and velociraptors roaming about.
BTW, alligators/crocodiles just barely miss out on being called dinosaurs in most definitions, and any definition that would lump pterosaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, etc in with dinosaurs would also lump in alligators / crocodiles. They're birds' closest living relatives, both descended from the archosaurs.
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Seeing as that order are all "ground-eating" birds, the reason is probably mostly based on: "Bird that doesn't fly too high when I try to catch it."
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They also have rather high egg laying capacity compared to most birds - usually half a dozen to over dozen eggs in a clutch.
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And now the math/science/food geek in me wants to calculate just how many humans an Apatosaurus would feed.
Given that 1 pound of turkey is considered a serving (accounting for bone weight) and assuming a similar bone-meat ratio in Apatosaurus (a big assumption, I know but this is a quick calculation), a 16.4 metric ton (36,155.8 pounds) Apatosaurus would feed over 36,000 people. Eighteen thousand if everyone had seconds.
Who wants to cure world
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I wonder what Dinosaur meat taste like ... Who knows? The cloned dino might become our next meal?
Or it could be opposite. If we clone them, we would be their meal instead?
Maybe we can clone us some dinosaurs (Score:5, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our giant drumstick-bearing, chicken-flavored overlords.
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I for one welcome this thinly veiled viral marketing scheme for Jurassic World, which is about to hit theaters this weekend.
(Though I don't plan to watch the movie until it's available in a red envelope.)
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Exactly. If there wasn't a mega-summer blockbuster in the queue for release, this wouldn't be news.
Re:DNA? (Score:4, Funny)
I totally read that in a southern US accent.
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You want potatoes or cheese grits with that?
An Ozark Haykoo (Score:2)
Palest white circle.
The faintest dab of yellow.
Ain't no such thing as too many grits.
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No. Finding actual DNA would be a real shock, as it's an unstable molecule. Even finding RNA would be quite a shock. It's amazing that we can even get some sort of "proteins" (maybe). Still, if this can be replicated, that's a great start toward understanding what would be in their DNA. We already have the basic framework (modern birds), and we can roll back many of the changes that have occurred in birds by looking at what they have in common versus what deviated in different lineages, plus potentially so
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Mary Schweitzer's been working on this since 1993 when she found soft-tissue in a fossil and nobody would believe that's what she'd found. Her latest paper [sciencemag.org] is getting fragments of the protein chains from a T-Rex. Back in 1993 she was told that any soft tissue at all was entirely and completely impossible. Don't know how realistic it is, but I really want to believe some manner of circumstances allow T-Rex clones in the future.
Re: Cue creationists (Score:2)
Re:Cue creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue young earth creationists claiming this dinosaur was intelligently designed 5000 years ago.
Sigh.
Some of them already claim that soft tissue discoveries proved that dinosaurs were recent. IIRC it was listed in the "creationist rigs search results" article a week or two ago.
Of course, there's a pending religious schism between those who claim all the dinos died in the flood, those who claim that they were saved by Noah and died later, and those who say they never existed at all (the fossils being planted by God to make sure no eviloutionists believe the bible).
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I sometimes wish my honesty and self-respect were low enough to let me cash in by publishing any kind of drek people are dying to hear.
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Cue young earth creationists claiming this dinosaur was intelligently designed 5000 years ago.
Sigh.
Some of them already claim that soft tissue discoveries proved that dinosaurs were recent. IIRC it was listed in the "creationist rigs search results" article a week or two ago.
Of course, there's a pending religious schism between those who claim all the dinos died in the flood, those who claim that they were saved by Noah and died later, and those who say they never existed at all (the fossils being planted by God to make sure no eviloutionists believe the bible).
You forget the existing religious schism which pits creationists vs those who accept evolution. This is something that completely baffles me, creationism, since I came to the US 26 years ago.
Creationism is hardly a form of thought in the rest of Christendom, but it is so dominant in the US. How can this country who has achieved so much have so many troglodyte-thinking people?
My grandma back in my country, who has never left her little mountain town and who only completed elementary education accepts e
Re:Cue creationists (Score:5, Insightful)
Cue young earth creationists claiming this dinosaur was intelligently designed 5000 years ago.
Why do you even bring it up? You honor the creationists too much by acknowledging their existance, and you help their cause by simplifying and slightly misinterpreting their (enormously flawed) arguments, thereby giving them the chance to come back with a "correction" of your post, while completely ignoring science (again).
And by some amazing coincidence (Score:1)
New Jurassic Park film coming to a cinema near you!
1993 called (Score:3)
They want their headline back. Mary Schweitzer [wikipedia.org] already made the same discovery in 1993, and she's been fighting for more than 2 decades to get her findings past the "consensus" that such long preservation was impossible. It seemed like she had gotten her findings verified again by 2000 but I guess it's still only now becoming generally accepted. Really unfortunate it can still take that long for a major discovery to become accepted.
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The controversy is usually framed as Creation vs Evolution, but really it's Biochemistr
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And in fact the Science article mentions that Schweitzer is skeptical of the new results. She's the expert in all the ways in which the conclusions could be wrong, since she's got one of those extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proofs. She's sincere and not stupid, but the things that she's trying to detect are extremely tiny and subject to a lot of contamination, and she's well aware that it could be wrong.
This is a preliminary result and will require a lot of different approaches to give the kin
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They want their headline back. Mary Schweitzer [wikipedia.org] already made the same discovery in 1993, and she's been fighting for more than 2 decades to get her findings past the "consensus" that such long preservation was impossible. It seemed like she had gotten her findings verified again by 2000 but I guess it's still only now becoming generally accepted. Really unfortunate it can still take that long for a major discovery to become accepted.
The only reason this is news now is because of the Jurassic World release. Note that 1993 was when Jurassic Park was released.