A few years ago, I got to write about the
fascinating discovery of what appeared to be blood vessels and red blood cells preserved within a T. Rex fossil. Just out today (and appearing Friday in Science) - the analysis of the bone contents. (
NYTimes) (
LATimes)
3 comments:
It's too bad that NYTimes requires registration; I have a free account, but it's just such a pain to login.
So, I read an article on MSNBC instead, and the gist seems to be that no DNA has been analyzed at this point. Rather, specific protein sequences have been analyzed, and compared to present-day species to look for similarities in the amino acid sequences.
As the article brings out, this is interesting because evolutionary lines have historically been determined by similarities in morphology. When all you have are fossils, that's all you can use! But now scientists are trying to apply more molecular biological techinques to determine similarities and differences between these creatures and our modern-day fauna.
I also talked about this latest discovery on www.spoonfulloftruth.com today. No use in reposting my insights so please check them out there.
Pretty amazing. Is Jurassic Park really that far out of the realm of possibility? We already cloned Dolly; Next up, Rexy! (Okay, so we're not anywhere near close at all, but it's fun to indulge the imagination once in a while). On a site note, I've eaten alligator, and it did kinda taste like chicken :-)
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