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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: 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.