Thursday, April 12, 2007 | Science : Genetics | print version

T. rex tissue shows they are related to chickens

by Thomas H. Maugh II

UPDATE: NYTimes.com picks up the story as well:
Study Identifies Dinosaur Protein [click here]

Reposted from:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-dino13apr13,0,6205211.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Thanks to Gordon Brown for sending this in.

Foghorn Leghorn would be proud.*

The cantankerous Looney Tunes rooster and his brethren appear to be the closest living descendants of the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex that ruled the world of dinosaurs.

That's the conclusion of a team of researchers who analyzed a remarkable 68-million-year-old sample of T. rex tissue.

It began two years ago when paleontologist Mary H. Schweitzer and colleagues at North Carolina State University announced they had found bits of soft tissue inside a fossilized T. rex bone excavated from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. At the time, no detailed tests had been conducted on the material.

Researchers wouldn't have known about the tissue except that they had to break the massive bone to load it into a helicopter. Inside, they found brownish oblong cells and translucent vessels so elastic they could still be stretched like rubber bands.

The new findings, to be reported Friday in the journal Science, show that part of the tissue is collagen, the fibrous protein forming the scaffolding that supports the minerals in bone.

Spectroscopist John M. Asara of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston then used technology developed to identify minute traces of proteins in tumors. He broke the collagen down into seven short fragments and analyzed the sequence of the 15 to 20 amino acids in each fragment.

Comparing those seven sequences to established genomes of modern species, they found three that matched chickens, one that matched a frog and another that matched a newt. The protein reacted to antibodies against chicken collagen.

The finding supports the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs -- an idea that until now has been largely based on comparing bone structures.

"This allows you to get the chance to say, 'Wait, they really are related because their sequences are related,'." Asara said. "We didn't get enough sequences to definitively say that, but what sequences we got support that idea."

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

For further reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/science/13dino.html?ref=science
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5822/277
http://web.med.harvard.edu/sites/RELEASES/html/TRex.html

* For our non-US raised visitors Foghorn Leghorn is a cartoon rooster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foghorn_Leghorn

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1. Comment #31439 by Rtambree on April 12, 2007 at 5:11 pm

It's good to see independent lines of evidence supporting hypotheses. Science is unique in this regard.

But the Christians will just say "God uses the same toolkit". The left hemisphere of the brain is always capable of interpreting or reconciling any piece of scientific data with dogma.

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2. Comment #31440 by mummymonkey on April 12, 2007 at 5:17 pm

Tyrannosaurus pecks

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3. Comment #31445 by Ohnhai on April 12, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Damn!!! thats one Hell of a Drumstick!!!

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4. Comment #31448 by OsakaGuy on April 12, 2007 at 5:46 pm

I really don't get how soft tissue could survive for millions of years in a fossilized bone. Could someone with more expertise in this area explain how that could happen?

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5. Comment #31450 by BMMcArdle on April 12, 2007 at 5:58 pm

Does this mean that instead of saying that everything tastes like chicken we can say that it tastes like T-Rex?

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6. Comment #31452 by MiloC on April 12, 2007 at 6:15 pm

One of the many things I like about living in Montana (I am a native) is that this state is a palaeontological treasure trove. We are rich in dinosaur fossils and the very first, and I think only complete triceratop fossil remains was found in eastern Montana. It is on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman Montana. It is breath taking.

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7. Comment #31453 by MarcusA on April 12, 2007 at 6:15 pm

Darn... BMMcArdle got to the "tastes like chicken" comment before me.

"I really don't get how soft tissue could survive for millions of years in a fossilized bone. Could someone with more expertise in this area explain how that could happen?"

I suspect in a low oxygen environment decay would be very slow or nonexistent. Quick burial and massive bone size probably helped too. But I hope they publish more on the details of the fossil bones.

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8. Comment #31456 by Friend Giskard on April 12, 2007 at 6:51 pm

The way this article is written, and its title, could leave one with the impression that T.rex is more closely related to chickens than it is to some other types of bird.

But if this were so then T. rex would have to be classified as a bird.

This could be misleading to some readers.

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9. Comment #31458 by mithraman on April 12, 2007 at 7:06 pm

Just as I thought - those dinosaurs may look tough, but it turns out they're nothing but big chickens.

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10. Comment #31464 by phasmagigas on April 12, 2007 at 8:15 pm

heres a quote from a creationist website (i opened it thinking it was a valid site as it was discussing the fossil material):

quote 'Soft tissue, blood vessels, and blood cells found inside Tyrannosaurus Rex leg bone! It is not millions of years old, probably not even thousands. Dinosaurs lived with man, and were on the ark, just as the Bible indicates' unquote

how many fallicies there? Strange that creationists didnt consider all the other evidence showing that the fossil isnt 6000 years old first, well what else would you expect. Its interesting that we all, creationists and evolutionists think 'wow, incredible, soft tissue' as our preconceptions bias our expectations (ie that fossils are (mainly)all mineral replacements).

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11. Comment #31465 by Quine on April 12, 2007 at 8:21 pm

I'll bet dino hunters are out searching the bird genome even as we speak (type).

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12. Comment #31468 by RickM on April 12, 2007 at 8:34 pm

This T. Rex was female and pregnant:

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8083

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13. Comment #31472 by ykboots on April 12, 2007 at 8:58 pm

. Comment #31448 by OsakaGuy on April 12, 2007 at 5:46 pm
"I really don't get how soft tissue could survive for millions of years in a fossilized bone. Could someone with more expertise in this area explain how that could happen?"

Preservation is a complex process, primarily involving a rapid burial to prevent decomposition, and remineralization, or the replacement of original material with rock. (See Taphonomy) This precess typically happens from the outside of the specimen to the inside. It is conceivable that the remineralization process was not completed, leaving some original material in place. If I remember correctly, this is not the first time original material has been found, and as I understand this particular case, the material (collagen)was not of sufficient quality to make a definitive declaration of relationship, but rather a tentative relationship based on shared characteristics.

Probably a bit more than you needed but I hope it helps.

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14. Comment #31482 by Roy_H on April 12, 2007 at 11:14 pm

Comment #31445 by Ohnhai on April 12, 2007 at 5:39 pm
thats one Hell of a Drumstick!!!
It reminds me of someone taking off the TV cook Fanny Cradock, it was a sketch where she was supposed to be cooking a rhinoceros ."Pop the rhino into the oven, cook for about 3 weeks at gas mark 4 and then Serve with RATHER a lot of chips....."

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15. Comment #31485 by epicure on April 12, 2007 at 11:32 pm

Roy_H: that 'someone' was Betty Marsden in character as 'Daphne Whitethigh' in the BBC radio series 'Round The Horne', written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman

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16. Comment #31489 by Karl Christensen on April 13, 2007 at 12:33 am

Loaves and fishes. Nah, Jesus sent out for KFT-Rex.

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17. Comment #31503 by BillySands on April 13, 2007 at 3:02 am

For those who can access it, the original paper is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5822/277

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18. Comment #31516 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on April 13, 2007 at 4:46 am

Hi all ... my latest offering. This time on a controversial subject .... GW.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v1c0smq-us

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19. Comment #31527 by Luthien on April 13, 2007 at 5:59 am

I once gave this answer to "which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

...who would have guessed I was right ;-)

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20. Comment #31528 by Luthien on April 13, 2007 at 6:02 am

Actually, my best answer to the chicken and egg question was: "The question is flawed because it assumes a discrete process where there is actually a continuous process".

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21. Comment #31536 by ghostbuster on April 13, 2007 at 7:33 am

I think the world would have been better off with T-Rex and her clan. Maybe we'd be the ones finger lickin' good.

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22. Comment #31542 by Patchell on April 13, 2007 at 7:52 am

T-Rex, the other, other, other white meat!

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23. Comment #31556 by karlJ on April 13, 2007 at 8:34 am

Wow! I'm thinking barbecue. With a little DNA tinkering we might just bring one of them chickens to life. yummy!

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24. Comment #31568 by Phaderus on April 13, 2007 at 9:45 am

There was an article in Scientific American sometime last year about the discovery of the soft tissue in the T. Rex femur. Apparently, the scientist working on cleaning and preparing the bone accidentally spilled some water or some other liquid on the fossil and it was absorbed by some parts and resoftened. Definitely one of those Eureka moments.

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25. Comment #31578 by nickthelight on April 13, 2007 at 10:48 am

Foghorn Leghorn

..."When I say wo I mean wo!"

that Rooster?

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26. Comment #31647 by Cdat on April 13, 2007 at 3:45 pm

Wait until KFC gets wind of this, imagine a two piece snack that can feed the whole neighborhood.

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27. Comment #31654 by ed on April 13, 2007 at 4:12 pm

Im interested to know if anybody has a response to Friend Giskard's comment #31456. Is it possible that T Rex could be more closely related to chickens or even the Phasianidae family or galliformes order than to any other type of bird?

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28. Comment #31704 by boxmonkey on April 13, 2007 at 11:55 pm

Anyone who has had a pet parrot can easily imagine them as small, evolved dinosaurs. Some of the terrors seem to still believe themselves to be T-rexes, too.

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29. Comment #31781 by phasmagigas on April 14, 2007 at 8:52 am

here a BBC link looking at ken hams creation museum, luckily the reporting doesnt come across as being to enamoured of kens beliefs:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6549595.stm

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30. Comment #31809 by laks.84 on April 14, 2007 at 11:27 am

if Dinos lived with man, ate nuts and berries (even though they had sharp claws and teeth), were ardent veggies, then why did God wipe them out? Dino dung management problems? Because man invented wheels, so dinos were of no use for transport??

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