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March 28, 2005
T. Rex DNA
And now... comes the part... where we clone the shit out of those fuckers!
Palaeontologists have extracted soft, flexible structures that appear to be blood vessels from the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago. They also have found small red microstructures that resemble red blood cells.The discovery suggests biological information can be recovered from a wider range of fossil material than realised, which would greatly help the tracing of evolutionary relationships.
The preservation found by the researchers is extraordinary - far better than traditionally expected in dinosaur bone. But that may be because researchers have not been looking hard enough at their finds. Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University, US, has also extracted similar soft structures from a few other dinosaur bones.
The leg bone came from a skeleton called B-rex found in a remote canyon in South Dakota, in 2000 by a member of Jack Horner's research team at the Museum of the Rockies in Montana. The 107-centimetre-long femur - small for a T. rex - was intact when found, and its hollow interior had not been filled with minerals. That is unusual for a long-buried bone.
(via wirednews and new scientist)
Posted by Groonk at March 28, 2005 09:56 AM | Ministry of Animals, Cloning, Science
