The discovery of traces of flesh in a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone ties the King of the Dinosaurs to modern-day species and, scientists say, heralds a "milestone" shift in paleontology.


"Based on the small sample we've recovered, chickens may be the closest relatives (to T. rex)," says geneticist John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, co-leader of a team reporting the discovery of faint traces of chicken-like bone lining preserved inside a dinosaur drumstick.


In studies reported in the journal Science, Asara and colleagues conclude that seven traces of proteins detected in purified T. rex bone most closely match those reported in chickens, followed by frogs and newts.

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The astonishing find of barely detectable tissue from a creature tens of millions of years old, along with similar traces the team found in a mastodon bone at least 160,000 years old, upends the conventional view of fossils and may shift paleontologists' focus from bone hunting to biochemistry, say experts.


Until now, scientists thought fossilization replaced every last bit of living tissue with inert mineral.


"I'd call it a milestone," says paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal, who was not part of the studies. "Dinosaurs will enter the field of molecular biology and really slingshot paleontology into the modern world."


In the two studies, led by Asara and Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the team unearthed a T. rex buried underneath 60 feet of cliffside rock in Hell Creek, Mont.


Keeping the dinosaur entombed in sandstone to prevent contamination, the scientists extracted a few grams of material from its thick thighbone, and forwarded the bone powder to Asara's lab. There it was ground down to about a billionth of a gram of material, suitable for inspection with a high-tech mass spectrometer generally used to precisely diagnose cancer genes inside tumors.


The team suspects the dry sandstone, combined with the thickness of the T. rex bone, allowed some faint measure of preservation, only about 1% of the purified sample's collagen, the ribbonlike tissue found in ligaments, tendons and bone lining inside the thighbone.


The protein traces are a far cry from the Jurassic Park vision of genes leading to a re-created dinosaur, Larsson notes. He voiced some caution about the results until independent researchers have ruled out the possibility of contamination in the bone samples.


"It wasn't terribly long ago we thought there was no preservation whatsoever in fossils," says paleontologist Thomas Holtz of the University of Maryland in College Park. "We have a lot more to learn about fossilization."


"Finding any soft tissues in dinosaur bones greatly surprised us," says Schweitzer, who led a 2005 study that found still-elastic blood vessel remains in a dinosaur bone. Her team plans to embark on a worldwide exploration of dinosaur sites in the next year, looking for more fossil bones to examine.

chicken is good but T-rex a chicken he was mighty

I'm tired of scientists making up b.s. so they found a soft tissue in the T-rex bones b.s.

lol, wait a second- who cares if killer dinosaurs were related to chickens!?!? Oh no, if this gets out and the chickens here, there could be a rebellion against the farmers of america, and that will be immediatly plummet in chicken prices cuz they'll all have been killed and sold! Heyyyyyyyy that's a pretty good sci fi story for you there! If I was a paleentalogist, and I went out and looked for dead things every day, I think I'd have to either kill myself or get a life.

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Pirates ftw! http://www.politicsforumpoliticalwor...uestion-2.html

lol ! at dinosaurs being chickens, lol

I can believe this, actually. We have a couple of chickens, and they move like I'd expect dinosaurs to. The way they behave as well, they're primarily herbivores but they act like predators, darting in and killing small animals like mice.

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lol ! you mean raptors but not the T-Rex and not like chickens either lol

lol, hey, USA warrior, ummm is lol ur fave slang? It's mine! I get what u mean, Oz. But I don't think it neccasarily is true/ beleivable that they're relatives. And who cares? It's not like we're going to be able to use medicine we now use on chickens on T-rex's, lol!

__________________
"Love has its sonnets galore. War has its epics in heroic verse. Tragedy its sombre story in measured lines. Baseball has Casey at the Bat." - Albert Spalding

You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun, than with a kind word alone. -Al Capone

"There are three things that should never be talked about; politics, religion, and... the Great Pumkin."
-Linus
Pirates ftw! http://www.politicsforumpoliticalwor...uestion-2.html

If you guys cannot comprehend the purpose of such research, just imagine trying to explain the utility of algebra to a monkey.

Dinosaur's are said to be related to exotic birds, or birds but not chickens that we eat

Everyone knows that chickens are not birds. Dinosaurs may have been related to Red Jungle Fowl, but they cannot be related to the chickens that we eat...everyone knows that chickens come from the supermarket; not dinosaurs!