t-rex soft tissue

nacker
Posts: 117
Joined: 2006-06-06
User is offlineOffline
t-rex soft tissue

T. rex fossil has 'soft tissues'

T. rex is perhaps the most famous dino and Montana has yielded excellent fossil specimens
Dinosaur experts have extracted samples of what appear to be soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone.
The US researchers tell Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels.
In the hotly contested field of dino research, the work will be greeted with acclaim and disbelief in equal measure.
What seems certain is that some fairly remarkable conditions must have existed at the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago.
Normally when an animal dies, worms and bugs will quickly eat up anything that is soft.
Then, as the remaining bone material gets buried deeper and deeper in the mud, it gets heated, crushed and replaced by minerals - it is turned to stone.
Fine-scale process
The form, and nothing else, is all that is left of the original. On the outside, the hindlimb fossil designated MOR (Museum of the Rockies specimen) 1125 has this appearance.
But when Dr Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University, dissolved away the minerals, she found something extraordinary inside.

The soft structures move back into position after flexing
She discovered transparent, flexible filaments that resemble blood vessels. There were also traces of what look like red blood cells; and others that look like osteocytes, cells that build and maintain bone.
"This is fossilised bone in the sense that it's from an extinct animal but it doesn't have a lot of the characteristics of what people would call a fossil," she told the BBC's Science In Action programme.
"It still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and it's not any more dense than modern bone; it's bone more than anything."
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.
She and other scientists will want to establish if some hitherto unexplained fine-scale process has been at work in MOR 1125, which was pulled from the famous dinosaur rocks of eastern Montana known as the Hell Creek Formation.
Protein route
"This may not be fossilisation as we know it, of large macrostructures, but fossilisation at a molecular level," commented Dr Matthew Collins, who studies ancient bio-molecules at York University, UK.
"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.
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.

I got this from a BBC official news page... I'm still researching this... but 70million years and still having soft tissue... could this change how we see the age of the earth???

Call it God. Or come up with another theory extrapolating the logical defintions of nothing and the infinite.


nacker
Posts: 117
Joined: 2006-06-06
User is offlineOffline
t-rex soft tissue

LeftofLarry
RRS local affiliateScientist
LeftofLarry's picture
Posts: 1199
Joined: 2006-02-12
User is offlineOffline
t-rex soft tissue

yes this is astounding news..hahah..and of course answersingenesis..et all are already...blowing this to be proof of a creator..hahahahahahahaha..... based on the age of earth argument.. how could it possibly be? oh boy...I will reserve comment until further studies..however, I will theorize this...perhaps the outer structure of the bone, obviuosly mineralized may have potentially fossilized first....leaving the inside of the bone completely sealed from outside degredation. perhaps causing as sealed environemtn that could have killed bacteria that was working at degrading the tissue...This theory of course would have to assume that the mineralization process occured quite quickly before all of the tissue within the bone degraded. however, it would be interesting to note whether environmental conditions, perhaps slowed or destroyed bacteria that could have sped the degredatoin of the tissues within the bone. The other question to ask is...is this unique to this skeleton? are there others in the area that share characteristics? Should we look at other fossils from differnt time periods etc.. INstead of giving a bullshit knee jerk reactionary SEE SEE EVOLUTION IS FALSE..GOD CREATED THINGS.. statement...more questions need to be asked.

I seriously doubt, however this is any indication that the earth is only 6000 years old as answers in genesis et al would have you believed, these guys are quick to distort science... But I'm intersted in seeing the results.

Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server which houses Celebrity Atheists.


nacker
Posts: 117
Joined: 2006-06-06
User is offlineOffline
theory

Your theory was probably pretty good, but the discovering scientist said that the bones weren't mineralized as in your theory. And you made an excellent point about how it couldn't mineralized quickly enough to preserve the soft tissue without another theory about the environmental state in which it might have been fossilized in. I'll paraphrase her quote, "There is more bone in these bones than anything else." And if you'll click the link that I posted after the topic, it shows you where soft tissue was found in other "fossil" samples.

Crazy stuff.

Call it God. Or come up with another theory extrapolating the logical defintions of nothing and the infinite.


LeftofLarry
RRS local affiliateScientist
LeftofLarry's picture
Posts: 1199
Joined: 2006-02-12
User is offlineOffline
Re: t-rex soft tissue

[quote="nacker"
Fine-scale process
The form, and nothing else, is all that is left of the original. On the outside, the hindlimb fossil designated MOR (Museum of the Rockies specimen) 1125 has this appearance.
But when Dr Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University, dissolved away the minerals, she found something extraordinary inside.

It has mineralized, but not all the way...interesting

also..

[quote="nakcer"
"It still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and it's not any more dense than modern bone; it's bone more than anything."
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.

It would be interesting to see where exactly these places wiht no bones are in comparison to the rest of the mineralized material. More research has to be done and I'd have to see the actual peer-reviewed paper where this was published in order for me to have any more accurate positive or negative criticism of the science and/or the results.

I'll look for it...
this is indeed interesting however.

Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server which houses Celebrity Atheists.


Yellow_Number_Five
atheistRRS Core MemberScientist
Yellow_Number_Five's picture
Posts: 1389
Joined: 2006-02-12
User is offlineOffline
t-rex soft tissue

The crux of the matter is that while this particular case is quite interesting (and explainable) it is not sufficient to cause us to question the overwhelming evidence we have for an ancient earth and universe.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. - Richard Dawkins

Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server.


SilkyShrew
Rational VIP!
SilkyShrew's picture
Posts: 147
Joined: 2006-02-11
User is offlineOffline
t-rex soft tissue

Finding a dinosaur with tissue still on or in the bones does happen sometimes. Basically, what they found was a mummified dinosaur. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing the dinosaur in question went through some process of saponification (in the most basic sense, the fatty tissue created a soapy preservative causing mummification - the famous Iceman mummy is a good example of this, although I think he was an example of wet soponification, while the dino could be dry soponification). While it is extremely uncommon for this to occur (just as fossilization is not common), it can and does happen. It seems so novel to us, though, due to rarity that sometimes we want to believe that it is astronomically improbable, when in all likelihood we just happened upon the rare specimen that has such a thing occur.

Other interesting examples of soponification are specimens of cadavers that have been found in stone burials such as the incident a few years back where a murder investigation was almost carried out due to a grave robbing incident (the body had been preserved and found and was in such a condition that people thought it was a more recent death, when the deceased had been over 100 years old), and the story of the centuries old nun body that is said to have been preserved due to some divine intervention, when in reality, it was simply a natural mummification process that had occurred. I'd think of other examples, but I'm too tired.


the_avenging_bucket
the_avenging_bucket's picture
Posts: 184
Joined: 2006-06-17
User is offlineOffline
Re: t-rex soft tissue

nacker wrote:

I got this from a BBC official news page... I'm still researching this... but 70million years and still having soft tissue... could this change how we see the age of the earth???

Go ask Dr Schweitzer how old the fossil is- i'm sure they would have dated it.

to answer your question: scientists agree that the earth is aproximately 5 billion years old. The existence of 70 million year old soft tissue is remarkable, but that doesnt change the fact that it is 70 million years old.