Chewy on the Inside
Okay, I'm sure everyone who is not encased in sandstone has heard the news: Intact flesh from a t-rex has been found -- and there is an effort underway to crack open more dino bones to get at the marrow.
Now, I'm not going to say 'it' -- and I hope we can all not talk about 'it', but the question I have is: "Does this in ANY WAY put the T-Rex and his buddies in even relatively recent [collective human memory] history. Or is it possible for tissue to survive intact for 70,000,000 years?
Now, I'm not going to say 'it' -- and I hope we can all not talk about 'it', but the question I have is: "Does this in ANY WAY put the T-Rex and his buddies in even relatively recent [collective human memory] history. Or is it possible for tissue to survive intact for 70,000,000 years?
Comments
go ahead and say 'it.' The whole internet has been giggling about you guys all day
Originally posted by giant
more pics
go ahead and say 'it.' The whole internet has been giggling about you guys all day
No giggling -- just a straight up or down on whether the soft tissue will survive 70,000,000 years.
It goes without saying this is BIG -- the amount of information that we can learn about the T-rex (and probably other specimens as well) just went up by an order of magnitude. Truly a historical moment. Just imagine if the DNA is intact -- you could concievably see a cloned T-rex in our lifetime.
I'd buy that for a dollar.
Originally posted by dmz
No giggling -- just a straight up or down on whether the soft tissue will survive 70,000,000 years.
It goes without saying this is BIG -- the amount of information that we can learn about the T-rex (and probably other specimens as well) just went up by an order of magnitude. Truly a historical moment. Just imagine if the DNA is intact -- you could concievably see a cloned T-rex in our lifetime.
I'd buy that for a dollar.
You can probably rent it for little more at the local Blockbuster.
Originally posted by dmz
Just imagine if the DNA is intact -- you could concievably see a cloned T-rex in our lifetime.
Coooool, my pet can kick your dogs ass.
Originally posted by dmz
No giggling -- just a straight up or down on whether the soft tissue will survive 70,000,000 years.
I guess we'll see
Hardly Political Outsider material though.
Originally posted by Gilsch
Hardly Political Outsider material though.
Moving, one door over, to the Lounge.
It is amazing and there are folks clearly puzzled on this one. Then again I'm not really sure how much is really known about how fossilization works. But I'm even less of an expert beyond the obvious geology explanation without details.
I doubt the DNA would last intact. DNA is tuff stuff-you wouldn't want your blueprints written on tissue paper. Then again, DNAses -those enzymes that eat DNA- are all over (you need to clean the stuff up somehow). However, if they even get small pieces, it would be a major finding with great potential for comparison to extant reptiles and birds.
IT seams the researchers are also looking into if any proteins can be harvested intact or nearly so. Again you can sequence the protein and make a good guess of teh genetic information that it came from.
What it will definitely do is give us much more information on the dinosur.
And yes this same scientist said that it will change the way we treat fossils in the future. However in my opinion it's a miracle that this sample survived 70 million years.
Originally posted by giant
more pics
go ahead and say 'it.' The whole internet has been giggling about you guys all day
Wow! according to your link they've already found more. That's very interesting.
"My suspicion is this process has led to the reaction of more resistant molecules with the normal proteins and carbohydrates which make up these cellular structures, and replaced them, so that we have a very tough, resistant, very lipid-rich material - a polymer that would be very difficult to break down and characterise, but which has preserved the structure," he told the BBC.
In other words, it's not actual dinosaur soft tissue.
There's more.
Dr Schweitzer is not making any grand claims that these soft traces are the degraded remnants of the original material - only that they give that appearance.
"This may not be fossilisation as we know it, of large macrostructures, but fossilisation at a molecular level,"
In other words, it's amazing, yes, but it's not yer actual dino flesh.
Originally posted by Hassan i Sabbah
I read about this on the BBC. It's not actually soft tissue, I'm afraid.
In other words, it's not actual dinosaur soft tissue.
There's more.
In other words, it's amazing, yes, but it's not yer actual dino flesh.
" My suspicion "
Well that sounds like one person's opinion. Let's see if she's proved right. Do you have a link to this?
-----------------------------------------------------------
Found it and here's more :
" But if there are fragments, at least, of the original dinosaur molecules, their details could provide new clues to the relationship between T. rex and living species, such as birds.
Inevitably, people will wonder whether the creature's DNA might also be found. But the "life molecule" degrades rapidly over thousand-year timescales, and the chances of a sample surviving from the Cretaceous are not considered seriously.
"I actually don't work with DNA and my lab is not set up to do that," said Dr Schweitzer. "Our goal is more to look to see what we can find with respect to the proteins that are coded by the DNA.
"To a large degree, most of the chemical studies that have been done suggest proteins are more durable than DNA and they have almost the same kind of information because they use DNA as their template."
Dr Collins added: "I would agree that proteins are the molecules to go for - they are the major macromolecules in bone.
"We've got some very interesting research coming out from a number of labs looking at stable isotopes (different forms of the same atom) in bones and clearly information about diets which comes from such isotopes may now be amenable from these dinosaur materials."
However, he cautioned that the great age of MOR 1125 may put such detail beyond the investigating scientists. "
And a link :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4379577.stm