Like dinosaurs? Soft tissue/cells found preserved!

fulloflead

fulloflead

Joined
May 3, 2002
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Anyone else fascinated by dinosaurs? I found this interesting and exciting and thought I'd share. Maybe they can extract DNA and eventually rebuild one like Jurassic Park.

T. Rex Soft Tissue Found Preserved
Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News
March 24, 2005

A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil has yielded what appear to be the only preserved soft tissues ever recovered from a dinosaur. Taken from a 70-million-year-old thighbone, the structures look like the blood vessels, cells, and proteins involved in bone formation.

Most fossils preserve an organism's hard tissues, such as shell or bone. Finding preserved soft tissue is unheard of in a dinosaur-age specimen.



"To my knowledge, preservation to this extent—where you still have original flexibility and transparency—has not been noted in dinosaurs before, so we're pretty excited by the find," said Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

The findings may provide new insights into dinosaur evolution, physiology, and biochemistry. They could also increase our understanding of extinct life and change how scientists think about the fossilization process.

"Finding these tissues in dinosaurs changes the way we think about fossilization, because our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this [soft-tissue preservation]," Schweitzer said.

Uncovering T. Rex

For three years scientists from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, excavated the T. rex from sandstone at the base of the nearby Hell Creek formation. The dinosaur was relatively small and around 18 years old when it died.

"The dinosaur was under an incredible amount of rock," said Jack Horner, a curator of paleontology at the museum. "When it was collected, the specimen was very far away from a road, and everything had to be done by helicopter.

"The team made a plaster jacket to get part of the fossil out, and it was too big for the helicopter to lift. And so we had to take the fossil apart.

"In so doing, we had to break a thighbone in two pieces. When we did that, it allowed [Schweitzer] to get samples out of the middle of the specimen. You don't see that in most excavations, because every effort is made to keep the fossil intact," said Horner, a co-author of the study.

A certain amount of serendipity lead to the discovery.

Because the leg bone was deliberately broken in the field, no preservatives were added. As a result, the soft tissues were not contaminated.

The museum, which is a part of Montana State University, has a laboratory that specializes in cellular and molecular paleontology (the study of prehistoric life through fossil remains).

The study authors also looked at several other dinosaur fossils to see whether there was something unique about this particular T. rex fossil.

"There's nothing unique about the specimen other than the fact that it's the first that's been examined really well," Horner concluded. Other dinosaurs, in other words, are probably similarly preserved.

Soft Tissues

Schweitzer's background is in biology, and she performed a number of tests on the fossils that are common medical practices today.

The paleontologist and her colleagues removed mineral fragments from the interior of the femur by soaking it in a weak acid. The fossil dissolved, exposing a flexible, stretchy material and transparent vessels.

The vessels resemble blood vessels, cells, and the protein matrix that bodies generate when bones are being formed.

"Bone is living tissue, is very active tissue, and has its own metabolism and has to have a very good blood supply," Schweitzer said.

"So bone is infiltrated with lots and lots of blood vessels in its basic structure. When bone is formed, it's formed by cells that are specific for bone, that secrete proteins like collagen and form a matrix."

Further chemical analysis might enable the scientists to answer long-standing questions about the physiology of dinosaurs. For instance, were they warm-blooded, cold-blooded, or somewhere in between?

If protein sequences can be identified, they can be compared to those of living animals. This might allow a better understanding of how different groups of animals are related.

The find may potentially change field practices, perhaps by encouraging more scientists to reserve parts of fossils for cellular and molecular testing.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/03/0324_050324_trexsofttissue.html
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The article I read on the subject quoted a biochemist commenting on the potential for DNA. He said that it was unlikely that any whole strands of DNA are still intact but that fragments may still be intact and may prove interesting to study.
 
Gollnick said:
The article I read on the subject quoted a biochemist commenting on the potential for DNA. He said that it was unlikely that any whole strands of DNA are still intact but that fragments may still be intact and may prove interesting to study.
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That may be true, but at least now they'll be looking for something that they previously thought was impossible. Who knows how many bones are currently sitting in museums and private collections now that could/could have contain/contained soft tissue, but everyone was too afraid to crack the suckers open and look?

Even from the fragmented DNA and protein strands they have now, can you imagine what we'll learn over the next few years?

Ya know, in the mid 70s I was one of those kids that knew EVERYTHING about dinosaurs. All I did was read about dinosaurs. It's amazing how much of that (They were slow, cold-blooded, lizards, some had two brains, they dragged their tails, they were all grey, stupid, etc.) has been proven FALSE since then and how much more we've learned.

Now they've 'cracked' into something new and we'll probably get a barrage of new data soon. I can't wait.
 
Serendipity indeed!



road-kil.gif


I knew I should have gone back and gotten rid of the evidence. Got-dang purple bastid!! :mad:

j
 
I find it interesting that they have managed to turn on some of the ancient dinosaur genes in chicken embryo's and they grew teeth like velocoraptors.... They could create a whole new race of nasty, little, ankle-biting "chickosaurs" ^0^
 
Glad you posted this. I heard something about it a few days ago and promptly forgot about it. I hope this goes a long way to solving the warm-blooded, cold-blooded debate. I mean, did those T-Rex's hop right out of bed in the morning and take off after their prey? Or did they wait around for the sun to come up and spend a half hour doing push-ups with those teeny-weeny arms on a flat rock like all the lizards I see on the National Geographic Channel? :D

I remember a few years ago they found either some fossilized skin or a well preserved imprint of dino skin. The interesting thing was that the representations of it were pretty close to modern day artists renderings for the movies. And they were just guessing!
 
I read that article a few days ago, too. Should be some interesting results.

By the way, I'm one of the rare people who is more interested in prehistoric mammals than dinosaurs. It's tougher to find info on this topic. Them dino's got charisma!

:)
 
yuzuha said:
....managed to turn on some of the ancient dinosaur genes in chicken embryo's and they grew teeth like velocoraptors...
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That's got me worried. I'm putting in a call to Jeff Goldblum tonight. THIS time, we're going to do it RIGHT! :cool:
 
Reptiles we call Therapsids had adaptations for faster warm ups tens of millions of years before there were dinosaurs. Dimetrodon is probably the most famous with their sailback structures. These were what we call the mammal-like reptiles that were the dominant form in the late Permian Period, before the greatest mass extinction of all about 250 million years ago. Mammals evolved around the same time as the dinosaurs in the late Triassic period, 225 million years ago, give or take a few.

There is little question the some of the Theropod (meat eating, bipedal) dinos were warm blooded, Their bones show vascularized areas that pretty much pin it down.

In Cretaceous times, there were dinosaur communities all over the North Slope of Alaska, which was then 6° to 8° further north than it is now. They would almost certainly have had to migrate south for the winter. Back then that area was Taiga, boreal forest, but had to get cold with several months of darkness every year. There were no ice caps then, but it had to freeze up in the winter

The large sauropods may have developed as a way to fight heat loss. Even without metabolic means to warm the blood, tens of tons of thermal mass will make it hard to cool off very much overnight. They call this isothermal homeomorphy. It was a factor in the development of the gigantism in what is called the Pleistocene Megafauna-the large mammal community that was around during the continental galciations.

As far as cloning goes, the science can't do it even with whole strands of DNA at this point. Cloned animals so far have been done by transplanting the cell nucleus from one animal into an egg.

For some good, not trivial, but not too technical reading on the mammalian radiation after the KT extinction and since, check out various books by Bjorn Kurten.
 
cockroachfarm said:
That's got me worried. I'm putting in a call to Jeff Goldblum tonight. THIS time, we're going to do it RIGHT! :cool:
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"Oooh...ahhhh... That's how this all starts, but then there's running, and screaming..."
-Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm in The Lost World

:D
 
shego -

On a serious note: I've read since I was a kid about the mass extinction, the KT boundary, iridium, the crater in the Yucutan etc.

The extinction is always described as "relatively abrupt" but I've yet to see or hear figures about a time frame. Do you know whether it was 1, 10, 100 years, 1000 years, 1,000,000 years?
 
panella said:
The extinction is always described as "relatively abrupt" but I've yet to see or hear figures about a time frame. Do you know whether it was 1, 10, 100 years, 1000 years, 1,000,000 years?
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Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event
The Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction event, also known as the KT boundary (the K is from kreta, the greek root of the word cretaceous, meaning chalk), was a period of massive extinction of species, about 65.5 million years ago. It corresponds to the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the Tertiary Period.

The duration of this extinction event (like others) is unknown. Many forms of life perished (embracing approximately 50% of all genera), the most often mentioned among them being those of all the families of the three orders of dinosaurs. Many explanations for this event have been proposed, the most widely-accepted being the results of an impact on the Earth of an object from space.
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(The entire article is available at the link above.)
 
fulloflead said:
"Oooh...ahhhh... That's how this all starts, but then there's running, and screaming..."
-Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm in The Lost World
Click to expand...


Oh Thanks man, that really gave me a belly laugh. Since they have been thin on the ground this week I really appreciated it :D
 
panella said:
shego -

On a serious note: I've read since I was a kid about the mass extinction, the KT boundary, iridium, the crater in the Yucutan etc.

The extinction is always described as "relatively abrupt" but I've yet to see or hear figures about a time frame. Do you know whether it was 1, 10, 100 years, 1000 years, 1,000,000 years?
Click to expand...

Extensive modelling of the climatological effects of the KT impact eventhas been done. I haven't tried to keep up in later years, but the mainstream view in the mid-late '80s was that there was no summer for about three years until the dust, ash and soot settled down. Models indicated that about 4% (equivalent to 10% of the present biomass) of the Cretaceous biomass may have burned, putting enough soot in the atmosphere to cut the amout of incoming sunlight.

50%-60% of biologic families perished, both on land and in the seas. Probably all land animals with a body mass greater than 25 Kg went extinct. the great marine reptiles like Mosasaurs and Plesiosaurs disappeared alopng withhuge numbers of invertebrates, including the Ammonites.

All of the pterosaurs died out.

Some dinosaurs had already evolved into birds, the rest went extinct.

Continental flora were already in flux as the angiosperms had appeared in the Jurassic and were pretty much taking over. This probably had some effect on the animal survival rates.
 
shgeo said:
Reptiles we call Therapsids had adaptations for faster warm ups tens of millions of years before there were dinosaurs.
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I'll have dicynodont on rye, thank you! At least they survived the permian mass extinction for a time. Who knows, they might have been good eating! ^-^
 
I really REALLY want a Velociraptor for a guard lizard !
He could kick back on my patio whilest I toil at work and guard my truck at night from vandals and visigoths. :D
 
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