What happened to the discovery of soft tissues and blood vessels in T-rex bones from 15+ years ago? It's such an incredible discovery and I've heard almost nothing from this.
Researchers Thomas G. Kaye, Gary Gaugler and Zbigniew Sawlowicz found that Schweitzer's samples(The T-Rex soft tissue you mention) contained framboids, and the apparent soft tissue was essentially pond scum. Through carbon dating, the team also determined that the material was modern, not prehistoric. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
There are other claims of soft tissues that are out there.Now that collagen has been proven to exist in dinosaur bone, hopefully the mechanism that allowed that will be understood, alowing a narrower search for other possible soft tissue remains.
Our cultural bucket list has resurecting dinosaurs and hover boards on it, so this is good news!
Well, the books had a better point anyway, but the dinosaurs on the movies were unrealistically overpowered to a point where the entire animal kingdom can't really hope to be.
It's too bad we can't actually resurrect them, because it would be unironically very cool. And the point of the book still stands anyway.
The only real problem with that is most dinosaurs lived in a time when there was 30% oxygen in the air. Maybe they could survive a bit at only 20%, but I imagine it would be like someone living on the top of Everest and before long succumbing to the lack of oxygen.
Nucleic acids are a more reactive species, and the half life of DNA is only on the order of 500 years or so.
The best bet we have to get something resembling dinosaurs is to invent them. By using extant theropod DNA, we could genetically engineer our way backwards. Basically improvisation.
The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.
I once read a book about this: How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. The basic idea is that dinosaur DNA is carried around by modern day chickens. The concept seemed pretty out there but the book does make a convincing argument for why it should be possible. The first author is a well known paleontologist, and the book was recommended to me by a paleontologist before I spent the week (as a volunteer) in his field crew.
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> The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.
I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.
If you used DNA across all birds, maybe it would be possible to identify the different bits of dinosaur DNA they inherited. Since they branched from each other at different points in time. And presumably wouldn’t have all lost the same genes.
"On February 29, 1980 (enough of a rarity in itself), E.J. Kollar and C. Fisher reported an ingenious technique for coaxing chickens to reveal some surprising genetic flexibility retained from a distant past."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
Two pages of technical explanation follow, but they got chicken embryo tissue to produce teeth.
Denesovian dna is a whole lot older than 500 years
wooly mamoths, etc.And there is no such thing as "ethics", the absolute law of human endevor is that if a thing can be done for some gain, it will be done.The proof that there is no ethics is the fact that no technology has ever been proscribed, all technology has in fact been used for the most
violent and/or profitable use that it can be put to, bar none. Peace and prosperity is the result of universal access to technology and violence, where there is no specific advantage to be exploited, not through "ethics" or morals.
Ethics and morals, work in a household or tribe, or school,etc, but are completely absent from international type relationships.
The faster we explore all of the possible implications of our newest technologys, the better, but its not going to be "nice" or the worst hell of all, fair.
> Through carbon dating, the team also determined that the material was modern, not prehistoric.
We see very clearly how assumptions and reliance on scientific theory eliminates the ability of a scientist to consider possibilities outside of a given dogma.
What happened to the discovery of soft tissues and blood vessels in T-rex bones from 15+ years ago? It's such an incredible discovery and I've heard almost nothing from this.
Researchers Thomas G. Kaye, Gary Gaugler and Zbigniew Sawlowicz found that Schweitzer's samples(The T-Rex soft tissue you mention) contained framboids, and the apparent soft tissue was essentially pond scum. Through carbon dating, the team also determined that the material was modern, not prehistoric. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
There are other claims of soft tissues that are out there.Now that collagen has been proven to exist in dinosaur bone, hopefully the mechanism that allowed that will be understood, alowing a narrower search for other possible soft tissue remains. Our cultural bucket list has resurecting dinosaurs and hover boards on it, so this is good news!
> ...has resurrecting dinosaurs...
You have seen that movie series, right? It doesn't seem to end as well as everyone hoped...
Well, the books had a better point anyway, but the dinosaurs on the movies were unrealistically overpowered to a point where the entire animal kingdom can't really hope to be.
It's too bad we can't actually resurrect them, because it would be unironically very cool. And the point of the book still stands anyway.
The only real problem with that is most dinosaurs lived in a time when there was 30% oxygen in the air. Maybe they could survive a bit at only 20%, but I imagine it would be like someone living on the top of Everest and before long succumbing to the lack of oxygen.
Nucleic acids are a more reactive species, and the half life of DNA is only on the order of 500 years or so.
The best bet we have to get something resembling dinosaurs is to invent them. By using extant theropod DNA, we could genetically engineer our way backwards. Basically improvisation.
The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.
I once read a book about this: How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. The basic idea is that dinosaur DNA is carried around by modern day chickens. The concept seemed pretty out there but the book does make a convincing argument for why it should be possible. The first author is a well known paleontologist, and the book was recommended to me by a paleontologist before I spent the week (as a volunteer) in his field crew.
[edit]
> The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.
I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.
If you used DNA across all birds, maybe it would be possible to identify the different bits of dinosaur DNA they inherited. Since they branched from each other at different points in time. And presumably wouldn’t have all lost the same genes.
Still looking for hen's teeth, but they seem to be as scarce as chicken breasts. (The only breasts found so far are on mammals.)
"On February 29, 1980 (enough of a rarity in itself), E.J. Kollar and C. Fisher reported an ingenious technique for coaxing chickens to reveal some surprising genetic flexibility retained from a distant past."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes
Two pages of technical explanation follow, but they got chicken embryo tissue to produce teeth.
Denesovian dna is a whole lot older than 500 years wooly mamoths, etc.And there is no such thing as "ethics", the absolute law of human endevor is that if a thing can be done for some gain, it will be done.The proof that there is no ethics is the fact that no technology has ever been proscribed, all technology has in fact been used for the most violent and/or profitable use that it can be put to, bar none. Peace and prosperity is the result of universal access to technology and violence, where there is no specific advantage to be exploited, not through "ethics" or morals. Ethics and morals, work in a household or tribe, or school,etc, but are completely absent from international type relationships. The faster we explore all of the possible implications of our newest technologys, the better, but its not going to be "nice" or the worst hell of all, fair.
Even in this discovery, intact collagen molecules have not been recovered, but only collagen molecule fragments.
Nevertheless, from many random fragments, with enough luck, one might be able to reconstruct much of the original amino-acid sequence.
I remember reading a pretty compelling counter-rebuttal too, though.
> Through carbon dating, the team also determined that the material was modern, not prehistoric.
We see very clearly how assumptions and reliance on scientific theory eliminates the ability of a scientist to consider possibilities outside of a given dogma.
> researchers identified preserved collagen remnants in the hip bone of an Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur.
Way to make some old people feel bad. "Here I am with a titanium hip, and some doggone dinosaurs, would you believe it, still got collagen in theirs!"
Welcome... to Jurassic Park!