Now I... I finally have time to do what I've
always wanted: write the great American novel. Mine is
about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are
brought to life through advanced cloning
techniques. I call it "Billy and the Cloneasaurus."
Posted on 03/24/2005 8:01:20 PM PST by aculeus
Astonished scientists have recovered juicy bone marrow and tissue from a dinosaur skeleton
IN a scene worthy of Jurassic Park, scientists have cracked open the fossilised leg of a 70-million year-old Tyrannosaurus rex and found juicy bone marrow.
They were staggered as they recovered what appear to be elastic soft tissues, blood vessels and even, possibly, cells — bearing a remarkable similarity to those of the modern ostrich.
Nobody is yet suggesting that T. rex might be reconstituted by recovering the DNA and finding an ostrich willing to be a surrogate mother but the question cannot be far off.
If scientists can isolate proteins from the material they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, according to the lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University. The material came from the thigh bone of a T. rex known as MOR 1125, found in a sandstone formation in Montana in 2003. The bone was broken in removing it from the site and Dr Schweitzer’s team then analysed the material inside.
When they had dissolved away the mineral tissues, they were left with something “similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from ostrich bone”, the team reports in Science.
In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton’s novel that later became a successful film, dinosaurs were recreated from blood taken from insects preserved in amber. Even Crichton would not have dared to suggest that soft tissue could be recovered from fossils.
Brooks Hanson, a deputy editor of Science, said that there were few examples of soft tissues that had been preserved, largely leaves or petrified wood and a few examples of insects in amber or humans and mammoths in peat or ice. But soft tissues are rare in older finds. “That’s why in a 70-million-year-old fossil it is so interesting,” he said.
Dr Schweitzer said: “It was totally shocking. I didn’t believe it until we’d done it 17 times.”
The vessels extracted included red and brown structures that resembled cells and within these were smaller objects similar in size to the nuclei of blood cells in modern birds.
The team also found structures looking almost identical to osteocytes — cells that deposit bone minerals — in ostriches. Using the same technique, similar vessels were isolated from another T. rex skeleton and from a hadrosaur, a different dinosaur species.
Further research is needed to determine what the soft tissues are made of. They may be composed of original T. rex material, or it could be that only the structure is preserved, the proteins being replaced by chemical compounds.
David Martill, of the University of Portsmouth, said: “There’s a reasonable chance that there may be intact proteins.” He speculated that it might even be possible to extract DNA.
Lawrence Witmer, of Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens, Georgia, agreed. He told Science: “If we have tissues that are not fossilised, then we can potentially extract DNA. It’s very exciting.”
Fossils form after animals are quickly buried in mud or sand, preserving parts of their bodies. Over a long period the tissue is replaced by minerals, forming a rock-like copy of the original.
Usually only hard material such as bones and teeth is fossilised but there have been finds of feathers, hair and organs.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
It was in his back pocket all the time!!!
Fascinating. Its sort of exciting to be living in a time when much of science fiction is on the verge of losing the 'fiction' part.
::groans!::
I'm remembering that post from this morning about the monkey.
WHAT are they even pondering!!!!
Check this out!
"God creates dinosaurs. God kills dinosaurs. God creates Man. Man creates dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat Man..."
"Woman inherits the Earth."
Think about that: 70 million years old and it still has structure and is hydrated. Uh huh. What kind of BS are these boys selling?
Only if the T-Rex had been scavenging scraps at the local drive-thru bronto-burger joint or eating a lot of proto-junk food.
On a serious note, a friend of mine digs fossils out in WY every year and says that they often smell of bone and sometimes of decay. Methinks something is wrong in the dating of these 'relics.'
Dinosaurs! We want dinosaurs! Good hunting, and will probably taste like chicken...;)
"On a serious note, a friend of mine digs fossils out in WY every year and says that they often smell of bone and sometimes of decay. Methinks something is wrong in the dating of these 'relics.'"
Methinks that you are 100% correct, go to the head of the class.
"Our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this," says Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University, Raleigh. The soft tissues she extracted from the rex "contain microstructures which look like cells and are preserved in every way. Preservation to this extent has never been noted in dinosaurs before."
Prof. Schweitzer is coy about whether "preserved in every way" includes the cells' DNA, which is what the antiheroes of "Jurassic Park" used to clone a theme park full of dinos. But the flexible, hollow blood vessels she extracted contain small spheres and ovals that may be nuclei of endothelial cells, which line blood vessels. Cell nuclei contain DNA. Has she found any?
"We're doing a lot in the lab that seems promising," she says. Such as? "I don't want to say."
I'll bet it's just some meatcake someone threw out of their refrigerator last week.
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