www.montana.edu...
Eastern Montana's B. rex now yields female bone tissue
The Tyrannosaurus rex known as B. rex has now yielded bone tissue that is common in female birds, said Mary Higby Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. A former graduate student at Montana State University, she is at MSU for the summer.
The discovery not only means that B. rex was female, but it signifies the end of a scientific treasure hunt, according to Schweitzer who announced her discovery in the June 3 issue of the journal Science.
Researchers have long predicted they would find medullary tissue in dinosaurs, but they hadn't found it until it appeared in the hind thigh bones of B. rex, Schweitzer said. Scientists expected to find the tissue in dinosaurs because other evidence linking birds and dinosaurs is so robust and all female birds have medullary tissue.
Also this story on newsscientist.com suggesting that it may be possible to get biological/chemical info from fossils:
www.newscientist.com...
Protein sequencing
Other researchers have previously recovered traces of protein from dinosaur bones, and indeed just two weeks ago Schweitzer reported traces of protein in 70 million year old dinosaur eggs.
"[The T. rex paper] suggests that biological and biochemical information might be recoverable from a wide range of fossil material," says Angela Milner of the Natural History Museum, in London, UK, who has detected proteins in Iguanadon bone. "There certainly seem to be blood vessels," she told New Scientist.
The next step will be to isolate proteins and try to sequence them. Comparing protein sequences could help trace relationships with other prehistoric beasts and with animals alive today. Schweitzer decline to discuss DNA because she does not work with it, but DNA is far less stable than proteins so is usually broken into fragments, even in tissue that has been frozen since the ice age.
Journal reference: Science (vol 307, p 1952)
I doubt they'll be able to pull off a Jurassic Park thing but the information would be invaluable to scientists, i would think... I couldn't find any new information on this so i assume they're not done studing the samples yet. Nygdan would probably know if there's anything new on this... Nygdan?
I noticed a 'Is Jurassic Park possible' thread on the boards; haven't checked it out yet. Might be worth a look... i'll go grab the link and edit it in.
(edit)Link to sci/tech thread on Jurassic park: www.abovetopsecret.com...
[edit on 27-2-2006 by Rren]
Yeah...i highly doubt that too, just because #1..it would be hard, nd #2 it's not safe, lol.
