My last (but first) post on this blog was aimed at one particular windbag and his minions, who should look as silly as they are; but I am sincerely sorry if I offended anyone who doesn't deserve it. Of course, my blog's title will offend environmentalist fundies, and if you believe in the Theory of Evolution, this whole post will probably offend you as well. You may already be offended that I'm using the word "fundie" in a way other than you'd like. But don't take any of this personally, because I'm being quite accurate, and if you find any mistake in it I will be both truly surprised and grateful.
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| Me with a friend |
Kentucky Fried T-Rex, anyone?
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| It's not their chicken you should worry about. |
With the release of Jurassic World (which has the coolest dinosaur fight scene of all time, by the way), I was reminded of an amazing discovery of actual dinosaur tissue back in 2005. Since I've been a dinosaur freak from my young childhood, this find and the subsequent tests run on it have kept my interest keen over the last decade. Not surprisingly, I was able to find a number of articles on the discovery in Science Daily. But what did surprise me was the following article, from just this year:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150609113703.htm
"Dinosaur fossil investigation unlocks possible soft tissue treasure trove."
Let me give a little background--well, more than just a little, to be honest. Back in '05, when Dr. Mary Schweitzer accidentally found soft, fibrous matter in the bone of a T-Rex (yes, the substance was actually soft and "stretchy"), excitement welled up within her, and controversy around her. Now this was hardly the first time that "fresh" dino bones had been found--fossilized bones, including those of dinosaurs, are seldom fully petrified. But what made this discovery special was not only the texture of the tissue within the bone, but the fact that it came complete with what appeared to be intact blood vessels, and even blood cells! A fundamental constituent of the Jurassic Park plot had finally been realized, it seemed. [1]
Of course, all sorts of questions were raised by experts and non-experts alike. Was there actually DNA preserved in the find? If so, could we possibly achieve the awesome, if frightening, dream of the Jurassic Park creators--modern dinosaur clones? But perhaps most importantly, could this find even be real? And if so, how?
Some in correspondence with Dr. Schweitzer actually proclaimed that it didn't matter how many tests she ran on the find, or how conclusive it seemed--they would never believe it had actual dinosaur DNA. Indeed, not only is it hardly conceivable that any kind of fresh tissue or proteins could survive millions of years, but the fact is that DNA naturally deteriorates on its own, no matter how good the standard conditions for preservation are, and traditional estimates put its maximum survival time to as low as several thousand years. If this find were genuine, and especially if it included DNA, scientists around the world would have a serious problem on their hands. Either DNA could somehow survive far longer than was previously thought, or else that T-Rex was breathing, eating, and stomping around only thousands of years ago.
To be fair, the possibility of contamination of the specimen was a very real one--a number of similar DNA claims had been made in the past years, only to be debunked as being the products of microbial and/or modern human contamination. So, a myriad of careful and extensive tests have been run on the 2005 find, some doubtful, but most positive. One of the most recent was conducted in 2012 by North Carolina State University and the Palo Alto Research Center, which concluded that the protein samples cannot be microbial, do appear fully original, and include DNA! Of course, the DNA can only be conclusively proven dinosaurian when we have more complete sequencing data; so any of the nay-sayers who still exist may yet see a ray of hope, no matter how dim. [2]
Meanwhile, a plentitude of both speculation and research has been done as to what possible conditions could extend the survival of DNA to millions of years. As a consequence, it is now accepted that, under the most ideal conditions, the half-life of DNA is 521 years, much longer than previously thought. But this still puts the absolute maximum age of genetic material at little more than six-and-a-half million years (and it would cease being readable at only about one-and-a-half million years). In fact, one article from Nature, published just weeks before the release of the 2012 study confirming authentic proteins and apparently DNA, ironically declared that all controversy had been put to bed for good, and that the fossil bone could not possibly contain DNA. Regardless, the 2012 study confirming the proteins’ authenticity stands. And, also regardless, the T-Rex is still accepted as being 75 million years old. Science doesn’t care about our models, it would seem. [3]
Considering all this, we can begin to imagine how important a single find of dinosaur tissue can be to science. But it appears that find is only the beginning! According to the 2015 article in Science Digest, "Dinosaur fossil investigation unlocks possible soft tissue treasure trove," numerous similar finds have since been made; but unlike the case of the T-Rex, these finds have been from fossils that were “poorly preserved” ! The article quotes Dr. Susannah Maidment, Junior Research Fellow from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, as saying, "…Although remnants of soft tissues have previously been discovered in rare, exceptionally preserved fossils, what is particularly exciting about our study is that we have discovered structures reminiscent of blood cells and collagen fibres in scrappy, poorly preserved fossils. This suggests that this sort of soft tissue preservation might be widespread in fossils.” [4]
No one had been looking for anything like this before Mary Schweitzer’s accidental discovery in 2005; it was simply considered impossible. Now we know that dinosaur bones everywhere, perhaps even the bones in the New York Museum of Natural History, could basically have fresh marrow in them. Imagine that.
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| Why did no one tell me? |
I will continue to keep on top of such findings while I can, and of course I’d like to know if the popular consensus will ever seriously reconsider the ages of those dinosaurs. Of course, the study of dinosaur tissue and DNA could tell us quite a lot about dinosaurs’ biological characteristics and development, which would be highly interesting as well. I’ve personally suspected for a long time that they were vastly different from modern reptiles, and the discovery that they were probably warm blooded and had some hair/feather-like structures is very tantalizing to me. I’ll be completely open here: I personally suspect that the ancient stories of mythological creatures from all over the world have truth in them, and that the creatures they describe are now dead, staring us silently in the face, in our museums of natural history.
This has turned into quite a little essay, but I thought it necessary to give enough background so you can understand why the 2015 Science Daily article excites me the way it does. I also thought I should provide some references besides just that one article, especially for the names, dates, and quotations I’ve given. The citation format is not formal; I just put corresponding numbers after the paragraphs where I gave information found in the following links. The first one has some amazing pictures:
1. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7285683/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/scientists-recover-t-rex-soft-tissue/#.VeYKfBGFPcs
2. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121023151333.htm
3. http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555
4. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150609113703.htm
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