Hadrosaur Proteins Sequenced 81
jd writes "In a follow-up study to the one on proteins found in a T. Rex bone, the team responsible for the T. Rex study sequenced proteins found in an 80-million year old Hadrosaur fossil. According to the article, the proteins found confirm the results of the T. Rex study, proving that what was found in T. Rex was not a result of modern contamination, as had been claimed by skeptics, but was indeed the genuine thing: real dinosaur protein. Furthermore, despite the new fossil being 12 million years older, they claim they got more out — eight collagen peptides and 149 amino acids from four different samples. This, they say, places the Hadrosaur in the same family as T. Rex and Ostriches, but that not enough was recovered to say just how close or distant the relationship was."
Re:Uh-oh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh-oh (Score:4, Funny)
If you get two of them, put fake red noses on them and slam them together really hard, you might see the higgs-bozo particle.
hmm. I know there is a shorter way to get to that punch line.
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Why waste money on the fake red noses rather than just use Bozosaurs to begin with?
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Re:MMMM - Tastes like chicken? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually ostrich tastes and looks like beef.
One of the best steaks I have had was medium rare ostrich.
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Actually ostrich tastes and looks like beef.
Naturally lean and flavorful beef, no less.
I miss Kroger; I'd have ostrich steak once a week when I lived near one.
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Great (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah - and any missing DNA can just be taken from common frog species!
Whatever it takes to get two of them. Once we have those, we can get to the REAL science. Large Hadrosaur Collider.
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
Large Hadrosaur Collider.
<blush> If you look close, I don't think they are actually fighting.</blush>
Yow! (Score:2)
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*bold*MOTHERFUCKING LARGE HADROSAUR COLLIDER*bold*
And then pictures of a motherfucking large hadrosaur collider.
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Yeah, that will TOTALLY attract the chicks!
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Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
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Perhaps they could be used to make genuine T. Rex protein shakes?
Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
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All the dinosaurs are running wild
Someone shut the fence off in the rain
I admit it's kinda eerie
But this proves my chaos theory
And I don't think I'll be coming back again
On no
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All the dinosaurs are running wild
Someone shut the fence off in the rain
I admit it's kinda eerie
But this proves my chaos theory
And I don't think I'll be coming back again
On no
Well done, sir.
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Maybe we should start using stimulus money to build some type of theme park, maybe on a remote island.
We'll call it Billy and the Clonasaurus Park!
Campaign for Real Semantic (Score:5, Insightful)
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mod -1 clueless.
perhaps -1 WTF are you talking about?
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Bitter archeologist/ex-archeologist? Science cynic? Earth couldn't possibly be more than 6,000 years old? Lab tech coerced by grant-hungry archeologists?
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Re:Campaign for Real Semantic (Score:4, Insightful)
That being the case, I wish they choose their terminology, like the term "prove", bit more judiciously, lest us plebs gets misled.
I'm impressed with the work they've done, but based on my own priors I'd like to see the work replicated by a different team before I'm willing to consider claims of proof as being very plausible.
As it stands, this work means, "The same people did the same things with a different sample and got similar results." Well and good, but not nearly so convincing as "Different people did similar things with different samples and got similar results."
GLHV (Score:1)
The egg is the key. (Score:1)
Then, upon seeing this Slashdot article, I finally understand. The ostrich is a very distant relative of the dinosaurs.
One ostrich egg could probably provide 10 servings of scrambled eggs -- and enough cholesterol to kill a gorilla.
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> The size of the egg [wikimedia.org] is amazing.
> It is about the size of a soccer ball.
A very small soccer ball!
A regulation soccer ball is 10 inches or 25 cm in diameter.
Ostrich egg is 5-6 inches or 12-15 cm diameter.
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Yeah, but children's soccer balls can be much smaller than regulation.
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Even a Size 3 soccer ball (typical for the youngest age groups) is about 7-1/4 to 7-1/2 inches in diameter, which is substantially larger than a 5-6 inch ostrich egg.
Re:The egg is the key. (Score:4, Insightful)
Every bird is a distant relative of the dinosaurs... not just the ostrich.
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Dietary cholesterol actually doesn't affect the body the way once thought (google around if you like)
Probably the only way cholesterol could kill a gorilla is if it were dropped into a vat of it :)
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You need to use the correct professional units, such as VW beetles, or Libraries of Congress. None of this soccer ball business.
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> But how does it taste?
Like chicken.
Etc Etc (Score:3)
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Insightful)
Things decay for a (chemical) reason. Very low temperatures, absence of oxygen, water, etc. can simply stop chemical processes. I have no idea of the circumstances of this find, but it seems entirely plausible that exceptional things can happen in rare situations.
This isn't a defying-the-laws-of-physics thing, it's more "we don't know exactly".
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Oh ho ho.
What they left out of the article was *why* the skepticism. Here it is.
These tissue types can only last hundreds of thousands of years, tops. So ... either it's fake, or there's some unknown preservation process at work here, or -
These specimens are not millions of years old.
That would square with the many puzzling astronomical discoveries which indicate "too young" objects (such as active planets and young comets), but cause havoc with the popular concept of how old the solar system is.
Heh heh. I love it!
You seem to have failed to grasp the concept of "proving a negative".
The only way we "know" (to use your quaint term) that "[t]hese tissue types can only last hundreds of thousands of years, tops" is basically because we've never found older ones.
Until we do.
Which it looks like we've done.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Interesting)
These tissue types can only last hundreds of thousands of years, tops. So ... either it's fake, or there's some unknown preservation process at work here, or -
Yeah, this is why there's so little known of the actual tissues of critters that old. But it's really an example of the "long tail" statistical phenomenon. Proteins, DNA, etc usually disappear pretty quickly, but there's no sharp cutoff age at which all samples instantly disintegrate into their constituent atoms. The decay is an exponential process, and no matter what age you pick, there's a small nonzero probability that there are fossils that old, until you get back to an age when there were no "tissues" on Earth. A very few fossils have been found that contain proteins that date to tens of millions of years. The story a couple of years ago about such a T. Rex fossil was an example that got lots of attention, mostly because it's such a popular dinosaur. But there aren't many people studying such fossils, because we haven't found very many of them.
The T. Rex tissues survived because they were inside intact bones buried in a place that has been dry for some 70 million years. The overlying material was never heavy enough to crack the bones, and the internal humidity never got high enough for any embedded bacterial spores to come to life. This is highly unlikely, but in a few places it has happened. Nobody knows whether we'll find more, though. It's possible that we've found the only such fossils that exist on the planet. Or there may be more buried in Montana, where both of these fossils were found. That area has been dry for a rather long time.
People are also considering the possibility of finding some very old frozen fossils under the Antarctic ice. But if they exist, they're in places that are sorta hard to get at. And the researchers want to be extra careful, because they expect that there will also be living spores (and maybe seeds) there, too. They don't want anyone doing the digging until they can be certain that the samples won't be contaminated by surface bacteria. But the digging (or more likely drilling) will probably be tried within the next decade or two.
149 amino acids? (Score:4, Informative)
Wow! Human DNA contains only 20 amino acids. (Actually, there is a 21st, but it's extremely rare.) I wonder what the Hadrosaur was doing with so many of them.
It sounds like our world really lost a lot at the K-T impact event.
(And isn't it wonderful how ambiguous the English language can be, especially in the hands of journalists. ;-)
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Human DNA contains only 20 amino acids.
DNA contains amino acids?
Now come on...
I have been helping my kid in high school biology lately and you are messing with what little understanding I have.
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Hmmm, well, most people would accept the phrase "This CD contains music." More precisely it contains a binary encoding of sound wave samples, which, when put together with the proper device, will form music. And more precisely for DNA, it contains base4 encodings of amino acids, which, when put together with the proper device, will form a protein. But, I still don't like saying that DNA contains amino acids or proteins. Since music isn't a physical thing, it's not the same thing. Amino acids are real
Re:149 amino acids? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, I don't see the ambiguity. If someone found a new manuscript of Shakespeare's that consisted of 10,000 letters, would you complain that the English language only has 26 letters?
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It sounds like our world really lost a lot at the K-T impact event.
I thought it was because of the Deccan Traps this week.
Proof? (Score:2)
According to the article, the proteins found confirm the results of the T. Rex study, proving that what was found in T. Rex was not a result of modern contamination, as had been claimed by skeptics, but was indeed the genuine thing: real dinosaur protein.
"Prove" is pretty strong word. What evidence is there that these hadrosaur proteins are just not _more_ modern contamination?
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Quoting myself:
"Prove" is pretty strong word. What evidence is there that these hadrosaur proteins are just not _more_ modern contamination?
Quoting the article (emphasis mine):
The authors hope the findings [...] prove that their T. rex discovery "was not a unique occurrence," co-author John Asara, director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Mass Spectrometry Core and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement.
To submitter: "proof" and "hope of proof" are rather different things.
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But, really, "hope of proof", even if it is what is in TFA, is an understatement. The results clearly do prove "that their T. rex discovery 'was not a unique occurence'," even if it is less clear that they prove that the T. rex findings were not modern contamination.
After all, if it is repeated in a different context, whether or not it is meaningful, it is not "unique".
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It's not proven until indepently confirmed multiple times. The researchers themselves don't use the 'p' word.
co-author John Asara said : "This is the second dinosaur species we've examined and helps verify that our first discovery was not just a one-hit wonder."
with faith, (Score:2)
You can believe anything. So you don't need to make up your own plausible explanation (or better: implausible), you just declare you don't believe that yet, and when some other nutjob has come up with a far-right field explanantion, you start to believe that one, because the guy goes to the same church as you do. In the end, your peer group/tribe is more important thzat reason, especially for unreasonable people.
Akkatjoemabh!
Google (Score:2)
When can google use these to mow their grass. `Goats are Ok, but these should taste like chicken.
hadrosaurs were discovered in new jersey (Score:1)