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Researchers Decode T Rex Genetic Material

Apr 12, 2:00 PM (ET)

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID

WASHINGTON (AP) - Researchers have decoded genetic material from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, an unprecedented step once thought impossible.

"The door just opens up to a whole avenue of research that involves anything extinct," said Matthew T. Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

And, the new finding adds weight to the idea that today's birds are descendants of dinosaurs.

While dinosaur bones have long been studied, "it's always been assumed that preservation does not extend to the cellular or molecular level," said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

It had been thought that some proteins could last a million years or more, but not to the age of the dinosaurs, she said.

So, when she was able to recover soft tissue from a T. rex bone found in Montana in 2003 she was surprised, Schweitzer said.

And now, researchers led by John M. Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston have been able to analyze proteins from that bone.

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The thigh bone was in the news again yesterday, but this time in an attempt to boost the evolution belief system. The analysis of proteins extracted from the T. rex is being used to show an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and chickens—that dinosaurs eventually evolved into birds (as is now commonly taught as fact in textbooks and science museums).

On this website tomorrow (in our regular weekend feature called News to Note), we will have more to say about this evolutionary claim. In addition, after consulting the original research into the protein comparison, we hope to say even more next week.

For the moment, let's not ignore the importance of what has been found (and as will be declared in the soon-to-open Creation Museum): finding T. rex soft tissue is compelling evidence that it was not 65 million years ago that dinosaurs died out, as given on the evolutionary timeline. Furthermore, if dinosaurs have been roaming the earth in relatively recent times, there would have been virtually no time, for example, for the supposed evolution of reptilian scales into intricate feathers.

Indeed, this T. rex fossil provides wonderful circumstantial evidence to support the biblical chronology of a young earth. Additionally, creationists already know that birds were created before dinosaurs: on days 5 and 6 respectively of creation week.

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Originally posted by beskeptigal

Why wait?

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The thigh bone was in the news again yesterday, but this time in an attempt to boost the evolution belief system. The analysis of proteins extracted from the T. rex is being used to show an evolutionary link between dinosaurs and chickens—that dinosaurs eventually evolved into birds (as is now commonly taught as fact in textbooks and science museums).

On this website tomorrow (in our regular weekend feature called News to Note), we will have more to say about this evolutionary claim. In addition, after consulting the original research into the protein comparison, we hope to say even more next week.

For the moment, let's not ignore the importance of what has been found (and as will be declared in the soon-to-open Creation Museum): finding T. rex soft tissue is compelling evidence that it was not 65 million years ago that dinosaurs died out, as given on the evolutionary timeline. Furthermore, if dinosaurs have been roaming the earth in relatively recent times, there would have been virtually no time, for example, for the supposed evolution of reptilian scales into intricate feathers.

Indeed, this T. rex fossil provides wonderful circumstantial evidence to support the biblical chronology of a young earth. Additionally, creationists already know that birds were created before dinosaurs: on days 5 and 6 respectively of creation week.

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Twisting, twisting, twisting.....

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I'm going to say this once and only once. It will be in large text to make this fact very cear.

IT WAS NOT DNA!

It was a very short fragment of a very common protein. Do not let this myth about DNA spread. It's everywhere I go and it's giving me a headache. The paper is interesting enough without all this nonsense about sequencing DNA from fossils.

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In refining the technique, he had previously studied proteins from a mastodon, and when he heard of Schweitzer's finding soft tissues in a T. rex bone he decided to see if he could detect proteins there also.

He was able to identify seven different dinosaur proteins from the bone and compared them with proteins from living species. Three matched chickens, two matched several species including chickens, one matched a protein from a newt and the other from a frog.

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Originally posted by filthy

They do, at least pretty close. So does snake and iguana.

And why should they not? All are related at a fundemental level. Sawbill ducks, however, taste like rancid fish so you can't use taste as a definitive identification method....

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