T-Rex Bones
Dean
I wish I'd noticed this item sooner: the May 24 issue of Science includes a paper by a North Carolina paleontology team who have recovered a fragment of a Tyrannosaurus Rex's femur and, instead of discovering a normal fossil, they ahve what looks and acts an awful lot like soft tissue. Indeed, have a look at that sample photograph over there on the left--it's one of many photos of her specimen.
Press release from her university here. Pretty good writeup with more photos in GeoTimes here.
They're they're pretty sure that they can't extract DNA from something like this, but they aren't quite willing to say it would be impossible just yet. In any case the whole thing is making big waves in paleontology at the moment--as you might well imagine.
Love this stuff.
That would be cool. There has to be some animal they could use to lay any eggs they get from cloning.
I don't agree with Jeff Goldblum's character about how, "Nature decided the dinosaurs should die so it would be wrong to revive them."
I would go to Jurassic Park in a heartbeat.
I would love to see us start to clone lots of extinct animals. From dinosaurs to mammoths to dodos.
Then we Republicans could rape the environment and destroy all the species and then we could just remake them. /sarcasm>
For example, your T-Rex story was reported last week ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4379577.stm
and today they are talking about brain implants
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4396387.stm
which sounds like something out of Neuromancer.
The thing about bias and spin is that just about everything has a mixture of fact and opinion. I have a very vague memory of one of the peanuts characters (I believe Linus) reading "The Brothers Karamazov" who had some good advice. When asked how he managed the long and complicated Russian names, he said he just "bleeped right over them".
Very Kindest Regards,
Robert
Screw Jurrasic Park. Clone 'em! That could sure put an end to the pesky neighbor's barking dog. And the pesky neighbor!
What makes you brainiacs think that from DNA, you can magically create the entire organism?:) How you gonna create the proteins, let alone the first cell?
Also, what about the time factor? If an adult dinosaur is 30 years old, will it take, say, 30 years to grow one from a DNA specimen?
Further, why can't we take some DNA from Dean Esmay and grow another intrepid blogger?
[Runs from console, worried that some young genius grad student will supply answers, making old Hank look more stupid than usual:)]
Hank Barnes
p.s. This sounds like an interesting paleontological find, so Bravo!
True - like were the warm or cold-blooded...might be able to find out what they ate, and what the overall environment was like back then; just endlessly fascinating stuff....Pure science is Da Bomb....