Update [2005-3-25 9:23:46 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando.
It's not quite time to dream up visions of Jurassic Park, and you're not going to be able to wander into the local Longhorn Steak House and order up a T-Rex T-Bone. But something really remarkable has been going on with dinosaur fossils.
On careful examination, paleontologists are finding that many of the bones contain soft tissue -- the remains of bone marrow or even attached muscle. 70 Million years fresh, straight to your local market (assuming your market is at a museum and you order your chops by the microgram).
How well preserved is the material? Remarkably so:
"The tissues are still soft, transparent and flexible, and we can manipulate the vessels with our probe," said team leader Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University. "The bone matrix is flexible. We can hydrate and rehydrate it, and the microstructures are preserved in every way."
The translucent vessels were so elastic that when one was stretched out and then released, it snapped back like a rubber band.
This isn't quite as remarkable as it may sound. People often have the impression (gleaned from miserable elementary school science texts) that fossils consists of material that's been completely replaced by "rock" in the form of dissolved minerals. However, that's only one of the types of fossilization. When it comes to bones, that kind of preservation, called "permineralization" is actually relatively rare. Many bones contain a significant amount of, well,
bone. Original material from other hard parts, like shells or horn, is also common, as is chitinous parts from insects, crabs, etc. In more recent remains, it's not unusual to find soft tissue, preserved by dry conditions in a cave or desert, or by cold conditions in a tundra environment.
The biggest reason no one had found dinosaur "meat" before, was that nobody was really looking. Most people just didn't think organic material could survive 70 million years or more in the ground. Now that paleontologists know better, they've found material in several fossils -- including the famous "Sue."
The proteins recovered have already reinforced the close relationship between birds and dinosaurs, and will probably allow us to get a much better idea of the relationships between birds, dinosaurs, and crocodiles (whose ancestors are also the ancestors of both birds and dinos). While scientists have been quick to rule out reconstituted dinos, there is this tantalizing snipet:
Working with the remains of a T. rex unearthed in northeast Montana's celebrated Hell Creek formation, the research team systematically removed minerals and fossilized deposits from the thighbone, exposing blood vessels, bone cells and possibly intact blood cells with nuclei.
I added that emphasis because, while in mammals blood cells don't have a nucleus, and because of this, no DNA, bird blood cells do come complete with nuclei. If dinosaur blood is also nucleated, we might actually pull back some significant fragments of dinosaur DNA.
Anyone want to start shopping for islands off Central America?
Personally, I have a big, shattered Edmotosaurus hip bone in a cardboard box upstairs that going to get a much more careful examination.
