AMERICAN SCIENTIST SOFT TISSUE DISCOVERED IN BONE OF A DINOSAUR
[March 26, 2005, 16:32:33]

In bone blasted from Montana sandstone, fossil hunters for the first time have discovered the microscopic soft tissue of a Tyrannosaurus rex, preserved almost unaltered inside a bone since the dinosaur died 70 million years ago, scientists announced Thursday, reported Los Angeles Times.

Scientists at North Carolina State University and at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman found brownish oblong cells, elastic threads of veins and pliable dabs of red bone marrow in the core of a stout hind leg, the researchers reported in the journal Science.

The translucent vessels were so elastic that when one was stretched out and then released, it snapped back like a rubber band.

"To my knowledge, preservation to this extent has not been noted in dinosaurs before," said Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

"The tissues are still soft," said Schweitzer, who led the research team. "The microstructures that look like cells are preserved in every way."

Under a scanning electron microscope, these dinosaur tissues - minute remains of the mightiest of Earth's ancient carnivores - were "virtually identical" to those of a modern ostrich.

The scientists have not completed their laboratory tests, so they would not say whether they had found any intact genetic material or had isolated individual proteins.

In the unlikely event that researchers could identify the actual genes of a Tyrannosaurus rex, it might help settle debates about the kinship of dinosaurs and birds, or even prompt efforts to clone Tyrannosaurus rex.

Far from a freakish accident of preservation, fragile fresh tissue inside dinosaur bones may turn out to be common, the researchers said. Indeed, a quick examination of three other dinosaur specimens revealed similar microscopic tissues inside the bones, they said.


The scientists' discovery began with happenstance: Fieldworkers had to break the massive thighbone to load it onto a helicopter. Normally, "people tend not to want their dinosaurs broken, or to have holes cut into the bone, or to cut them in half," said John R. Horner, a Montana State paleontologist and a co-author of the study.


"It may be that this isn't a unique specimen," said Horner, who has pioneered the use of molecular and cellular techniques to study the growth and behavior of dinosaurs.


If confirmed by other researchers, the find could force scientists to reconsider how all fossils are formed.


Until now, scientists have believed that bones fossilized when minerals gradually replaced organic material. Under current theories, organic molecules should not last more than 100,000 years.


"Our theories don't allow for this," Schweitzer said.


Other researchers were fascinated, but cautious about the announcement.


The field of dinosaur studies is an academic netherworld where paleontologists must compete for specimens with rockhounds and private collectors. It is no stranger to outlandish technical claims, black- market hyperbole and fraud.


Time and again, however, the truth of the vanished reptilian denizens as revealed by reliable fossils — creatures that flew on four wings, snake-necked vegetarians larger than locomotives, and giant fanged predators cloaked in feathers — has proved far stranger than fiction.





Philip Currie, curator of dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in British Columbia, considered the latest discovery plausible and called it "great news."

"Under the right circumstances, incredible things can be preserved in these fossils," Currie said.

But he added: "It is out on the fringes and consequently you have to be doubly careful."

In the curio cabinet of time, researchers have discovered a surprising array of primeval remains preserved mostly as life left them, including a 40-million-year-old bumblebee captured in amber, a 40,000-year-old woolly mammoth calf preserved in permafrost and an 8,000-year-old human brain buried in a bog.

In recent years, dinosaur diggers also have uncovered detailed impressions in layered sediments of feathers, embryos, skin and internal organs from the era of dinosaurs 65 million to 250 million years ago. In those fossils, the delicate pliable tissues survive only as a memory in stone.

Microscopic traces of soft tissues may have eluded detection until now, the scientists said, because paleontologists were too squeamish to break open their irreplaceable dinosaur specimens to dissolve the mineral matrix inside the bones.

Horner called the discovery a combination of adept laboratory analysis and an accident of fieldwork.

The tissue specimen was extracted from a fossil femur chiseled from 1,000 cubic yards of rock in the Hell Creek Formation at the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana. The bones belonged to a fairly complete skeleton of a 40-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus rex that died when it was about 18 years old.

It took field researchers three years to dig out all the bones. So remote was the site that the fossils could only be removed by helicopter.

The remains of the dinosaur were encased in thick jackets of plaster and were so heavy that fieldworkers had to break the thighbone in two places to load it aboard the aircraft. They also did not treat it with the customary chemical preservatives.

"On that particular specimen, it was serendipitous because we did have to break it to get it out by helicopter," Horner said.

The broken thighbone was delivered to the Raleigh lab of Schweitzer, who noticed what appeared to be unusual tissue fragments lining the narrow cavity at the core of the bone.

It took seven days to dissolve the surrounding minerals without contaminating the specimen. For weeks more, the samples were washed in chemical baths, incubated and purified.

In the process, Schweitzer essentially distilled the remains of a 5-ton predator whose step once made the earth tremble to a few milliliters of cloudy solution under a Zeiss dissecting microscope.

Magnifying the purified remains by 63 times, Schweitzer could see branching red and brown structures that looked very much like vessels in bones from the largest of modern flightless birds. She also identified what seemed to be three different sorts of cell.

"Ostriches that died six months ago are producing structures that are similar to dinosaurs that died 70 million years ago," she said.

this is un-american and a fake.

dinosaurs never existed.

Will science never learn from Hollywood?

Dinosaurs are the best... i would kill to see one Tyrnianorssaurus rex

awesome news...

My favorite Jurrasic Park moment was in the second movie when the T-Rex was chasing people down the city streets. They showed a group of Japanese people fleeing the scene in a subtle homage to Godzilla. I laughed my ass off.

NICE..

i watched this movie yesterday,,..

Hee hee! I usually watch at least one of the three once a month or so. I'm such a nerd. My poor child is doomed. I've got dinosaur EVERYTHING in that nursery! Bottles, clothes, wallpaper, toys, bath accessories...

Dinosaurs are cooler than bunnies and lambs.

Since Dinosaurs lived w/ humans, I don't find this that remarkable. I am surprised it hasn't happened more.

."And lo Jesus and the disciples walked to Nazareth. But the trail was blocked by a giant brontosaurus... with a splinter in his paw. And O the disciples did run a shriekin': 'What a big fucking lizard, Lord!' But Jesus was unafraid and he took the splinter from the brontosaurus's paw and the big lizard became his friend."And Jesus sent him to Scotland where he lived in a loch for O so many years inviting thousands of American tourists to bring their fat fucking families and their fat dollar bills."

this is total crock. everybody knows that fossils were placed on earth by God to test the peoples faith....sheesh

So that means dinosaurs are dumb....

i like it anyway...

dinosaurs rule!!

I would go see cloned dinosaurs. The JP movies have already showed us the wrong way to keep dinosaurs in captivity. How could we fuck it up?We could put computer chips in their tiny brains to control them. Maybe the military could use them for ground assault. What would scare Iraqi's more? Humvees or T-Rexs?

Gotta love Bill hicks.

And BTW how do the Christians explain dinosaurs??

i knew i recognized that bit!

without opening a huge can-o-worms here, i think creationists explain dinosaurs as having walked the earth with the early humans. or at least that's one explanation ive heard. another one is that dinosaurs didn't exist at all, but their bones were put there by God to test people's faith.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/museum/ ... PhotoID=19

eeek this cannot happen. The natural order of things is gonna get all outta wack.

When did dinosaurs live?

The story we have all heard from movies, television, newspapers, and most magazines and textbooks is that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. According to evolutionists, the dinosaurs "ruled the Earth" for 140 million years, dying out about 65 mil- lion years ago. However, scientists do not dig up anything labeled with those ages. They only uncover dead dinosaurs (i.e., their bones), and their bones do not have labels attached telling how old they are. The idea of millions of years of evolution is just the evolutionists' story about the past. No scientist was there to see the dinosaurs live through this supposed dinosaur age. In fact, there is no proof whatsoever that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old. No scientist observed dinosaurs die. Scientists only find the bones in the here and now, and because many of them are evolutionists, they try to fit the story of the dinosaurs into their view. Other scientists, called creation scientists, have a different idea about when dinosaurs lived. They believe they can solve any of the supposed dinosaur mysteries and show how the evidence fits wonderfully with their ideas about the past, beliefs that come from the Bible. The Bible, God's very special book (or collection of books, really), claims that each writer was supernaturally inspired to write exactly what the Creator of all things wanted them to write down for us so that we can know where we (and dinosaurs) came from, why we are here, and what our future will be. The first book in the Bible -Genesis- teaches us many things about how the universe and life came into existence. Genesis tells us that God created everything: the Earth, stars, sun, moon, plants, animals, and the first two people. Although the Bible does not tell us exactly how long ago it was that God made the world and its creatures, we can make a good estimate of the date of creation by reading through the Bible and noting some interesting passages:

(1) God made everything in six days. He did this, by the way, to set a pattern for mankind, which has become our seven-day week (as described in Exodus 20:11). God worked for six days and rested for one, as a model for us. Furthermore, Bible scholars will tell you that the Hebrew word for day used in Genesis chapter one, can only mean an ordinary day in this context.

(2) We are told God created the first man and woman -Adam and Eve- on Day Six. Many facts about when their children and their children's children were born are given in Genesis. These genealogies are recorded throughout the Old Testament, up until the time of Christ. They certainly were not chronologies lasting millions of years. As you add up all of the dates, and accepting that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to Earth almost 2,000 years ago, we come to the conclusion that the creation of the Earth and animals (including the dinosaurs) occurred only thousands of years ago (perhaps only six thousand years!), not millions of years. Thus, if the Bible is right (and it is!), dinosaurs must have lived within the past thousands of years.

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