SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A 75 million-year-old dinosaur fossil -- and a poorly preserved one, at that -- may have yielded traces of intriguing soft tissue. Scientists believe they've spotted blood cells and collagen, the protein that makes up connective tissue in animals. Their findings were published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
Years ago, researcher Mary Schweitzer found what she believed were preserved blood vessels in a T. rex bone, a finding that has since been supported by molecular analysis. But unlike the specimen Schweitzer worked with, the fossils used in the new study were poorly preserved, which suggests that soft-tissue preservation might not be as uncommon as we'd thought. However, further evidence is needed to confirm that the structures are what they appear to be.
It's exciting to think that if we can find more like this we can greatly expand our understanding of how life on Earth has evolved on the most fundamental level, such as seeing if certain traits were selected for given the environmental conditions represented in the same strata the fossils came from.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Funny) by engblom on Wednesday June 10 2015, @08:59AM
There is no way blood can be 75 millions of year old without decomposing completely.
The more this kind of cases coming up, the more reason to use Occam's razor again and rewrite the history. Why would it be so difficult to accept dinosaur existed together with humans? After all we have myths about humans fighting dragons.
It would not be the first time a believed extinct animal was found later in history.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @09:13AM
[Citation needed]
(Score: 2) by engblom on Wednesday June 10 2015, @09:34AM
When the T.rex bone was found with blood vessels and soft tissue, it was a big problem as at that time there was not even one single known way for all the soft tissues and blood to survive that long time. The same Schweitzer, as mentioned in this article, did experiments with just red blood cells (not full blood) and noticed the surviving time is longer if there is a lot of iron (as with just pure red blood cells).
However, to say this is satisfying would be to lye. Nobody got just red blood cells, as there is plasma and white blood cells also in the blood and there is still to date no known way for animal blood and soft tissues to survive this long time.
This is still an enigma for science.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @10:21AM
Its not unusual for there to be no known ways for something to happen before we see it happen the first time. In fact, I'd say thats the standard, that we only find out ways that stuff can happen after seeing it happen at least once.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tathra on Wednesday June 10 2015, @10:18AM
apparently there is. this is how science works, we find something that doesn't match up with current theory ("no way soft tissue could last that long without decomposing") and then figure out how it happened and adjust the theories. its fine to be skeptical - this is only the second claim of such a discovery, and even though soft tissue and red blood cells survived, the dna in them may not have - but outright dismissing discoveries as impossible is pure denialism, not skepticism.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:03PM
Frozen mammoth DNA, only some 10ky ago, is shredded into strands about 600 base pairs long [wired.com], good luck finding intact DNA in fossil bones 75My (a time Earth was much warmer - thus more micro-biologically active - than end of ice age)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:19PM
(1) Freezing water can destroy a lot. So the state of a frozen sample does not tell much about what state a sample might be in that was conserved in another way.
(2) The summary speaks about preserved soft tissue, not about preserved DNA. Completely different issue. Maybe your memory of Jurassic Park interfered with your comprehension of the summary?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:31PM
Maybe your reading comprehension is not at its peak at the moment? Hint: read the quoted fragment I was answering to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by tathra on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:47PM
i was the one who brought up dna to help distinguish which components could possibly survive and which couldn't. the soft tissue found is probably just stuff like tissue scaffolding and other tough proteins, but not really anything too useful like dna or cellular machineries; i'd be surprised if any hemoglobin proteins survived, but not that surprised if spectrin [wikipedia.org] did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @12:59PM
Why would it be so difficult to accept dinosaur existed together with humans?
Not hard at all. Years ago, I used to watch reenactments of that every Saturday morning on TV.
(Score: 4, Informative) by tathra on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:51PM
you can see depictions of it still to this day at the creation museum! [creationmuseum.org] they readily assert that humans and dinosaurs lived side-by-side, and even that people tamed and rode [quora.com] them.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:55PM
How else do you explain the GOP?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Wednesday June 10 2015, @07:23PM
Just to play devil's advocate [wikipedia.org], and just in case you don't know, birds are considered to be some of the closest living relatives of dinosaurs. The Moa is like a little T-rex without forearms. The Maori hunted the Moa to extinction.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:05AM
While the Moa looks a bit like a T-Rex without arms, in terms of the ecosystem they lived in, they were more like a deer or cattle, as they browsed on leaves.
In fact many of New Zealand's native trees evolved tough small leaves as a defense.
These ones for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podocarpus_totara/ [wikipedia.org]