70-million-year-old T-rex yields soft tissue…

Crazy.
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Team claims second batch of soft dinosaur tissue

A team of researchers led by the N.C. State University scientist famed for the controversial discovery of soft tissue in the fossilized bone of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex in 2005 has found more soft tissue in an even older dinosaur skeleton.

Results of the more recent discovery, from the femur of an 80 million-year-old duckbill dinosaur, appear today in the journal Science. The new evidence not only undermines skeptics of Mary Schweitzer's earlier work, but also may offer clues about where more bones with such material may be found. That could help other scientists replicate the findings and investigate how such delicate material could last for such an extraordinary length of time.

Schweitzer is an associate professor of marine, earth and atmospheric science at NCSU and has a joint appointment to the staff of N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. She and John Asara, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, were the principal authors of the paper. They collaborated with a team of researchers, including several from Montana State University.



A crew including Schweitzer and some of her students dug the duckbill femur out of a Montana cliff in 2007, after other research suggested that soft tissue may be more common in bones that had been buried quickly in deep sandstone.

They left a layer of stone around the bone to help preserve any soft tissue that might be inside and reduce the potential for contamination, Schweitzer said. That meant retrieving a chunk of rock and old bone that weighed 750 pounds, a feat that involved fashioning a sled from an old truck hood and dragging it up the cliff with a winch.

Then the crew rushed the rock and bone back to Raleigh, where the testing and examination began. Some of the material was eventually shipped to Asara's lab in Massachusetts.

Some critics had said the earlier study wasn't elaborate enough. This time, the researchers subjected the bone and its contents to more thorough analysis, including examination by more sensitive equipment and verification of the results by several independent labs.

As with the T. rex bone, there was no DNA, the code stored in cells that acts as a blueprint for every living thing, which may keep the talk of recreating live dinosaurs to a minimum this time. But the bits of protein provided at least some information about the dinosaur, including support for the theory that dinosaurs are more closely related to modern birds than reptiles such as alligators, something supported by the earlier T. rex study.

Thomas Kaye, a fossil researcher with the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, remains skeptical that Schweitzer and her team have found dinosaur tissue. Last year, Kaye joined researchers in Poland and California in writing a paper published in an online journal suggesting that material her team believed was blood vessels was actually more recent biological contamination from slime that grew after moisture invaded the channels in the bones which once held blood vessels.

Kaye said Thursday that the new study shows material with structure similar to that in the earlier one. He said that the team found barely detectable amounts of protein that they believe came from the dinosaur and said that if the researchers had found real dinosaur blood vessels large enough to be visible, as those in the studies are, they would contain vast amounts of it.

He noted that the paper mentions that Schweitzer's team had also found some bacterial protein, which could be consistent with his slime theory.

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