Posted on 04/24/2008 1:37:14 PM PDT by blam
T. rex confirmed as great granddaddy of all birds
19:00 24 April 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway
John Asara, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Mary Schweitzer, North Carolina State University Thomas Holtz, University of Maryland Tyrannosaurus rex, meet the chicken – your third cousin more than 100 million years removed. A new family tree based on protein sequences recovered from dinosaur fossils firms up the dinosaur's avian lineage.
"Palaeontologists have known this overall connection. We have now confirmed it with molecular data," says John Asara, a biochemist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study.
His team compared sequences of a collagen protein recovered from a 68 million-year old T. rex fossil and a half-million year old mastodon (a kind of extinct elephant) with those same sequences from 21 modern animals – including chicken, alligator, elephant and human.
Family tree
The collagen analysed was collected from a T. rex bone found in Montana. "What makes it possible is that it's exceptionally well preserved," says Asara. "You can't walk into a museum and take a bone off a T. rex and get sequence data."
Asara's team had previously sequenced the collagen protein using a technique called mass spectrometry (see our report on the development, Tyrannosaurus rex fossil gives up precious protein).
To build the family tree, Asara and colleague Chris Organ compared the T. rex sequence with collagen from other animals. Those with similar collagen sequences were grouped closely together on the tree, while differences in the sequences suggested the animals had long diverged.
For the most part, the collagen tree captured relationships palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists had little reason to doubt, including T. rex's kinship to birds and the mastodon's ancestry to elephants.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
That's why I wear a Tin Hat!........
I’m sure glad they downsized. I’d hate to having something like that poop on windshield.
BS
“T. rex confirmed as great granddaddy of all birds”
That is not what was stated in the article at all. Not to mention the glaring errors that were even mentioned in the article.
If these last two articles are any kind of example of “New Science”, it leaves a great deal to be desired.
(You think that's what they actually did?)
Interesting.
Good find.
INTREP - has anyone bothered to examine the pulmonary systems of T-Rex and birds? They are totally different.
Easy to believe if you’ve ever watched Hitchcock’s “The Birds”.
Dinasaurs were close to birds - that isn’t news - but it is unlikely that a T-Rex was the ancestor of any living thing, as this headline implies.
...and bang a gong?
I see your BS and raise you a Horsesh_t.
T. Rex was granddaddy of the Byrds?
What nonsense.
After 2 centuries of unearthing fossils, we have a pretty complete picture of the dinosaur fauna, give or take some outliers.
Surely if this were true one could assemble a credible, date-verified progression of fossils showing evolution from this prehistoric giant to feather-covered, hollow-skulled birds.
But, alas! Nothing even close.
Just recalling the scene of the lawyer taking a dump getting eaten by the T-Rex gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
It wouldn't open for me. I forgot that I put newscientist in my hosts file months ago, and clicked the link without checking it.
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