Dinosaur soft tissue discovery

This video from the USA says about itself:

7 March 2016

Mary Higby Schweitzer is a paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who is known for leading the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen.

From AFP news agency:

Dino rib yields evidence of oldest soft tissue remains

January 31, 2017

The rib of a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that lived 195 million years ago has yielded what may be the oldest remains of soft tissue ever recovered, scientists said Tuesday.

The find promises a chance to extract rare clues about the biology and evolution of long-extinct animals, a team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

Such information is mostly missing from preserved hard skeletons, which form the bulk of the fossil record.

“We have shown the presence of protein preserved in a 195 million-year-old dinosaur, at least 120 million years older than any other similar discovery,” study co-author Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga, told AFP.

“These proteins are the building blocks of animal soft tissues, and it’s exciting to understand how they have been preserved,” he added.

Reisz and a team scanned a rib bone of Lufengosaurus, a common dinosaur in the Early Jurassic period. Fully grown, these lizards

Dinosaurs are not really closely related to lizards.

measured about eight metres (26 feet).

The researchers used a photon beam at the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center in Taiwan to examine the insides of the bone, specifically its chemical contents.

They found evidence of collagen proteins within tiny canals in the rib and concluded they were “probably remnants of the blood vessels that supplied blood to the bone cells in the living dinosaur.”

Most previous studies had extracted organic remains by dissolving away other parts of the fossil, the team said.

With the synchrotron method, this is not necessary, and even older remains may be uncovered without damaging dinosaur bones in future.

Does it bring us any closer to recovering DNA from which dinosaurs may one day be cloned?

“No, that is still fantasy,” said Reisz.

The previous oldest find of suspected red blood cells and collagen fibres was reported in 2013, in dinosaurs that lived about 75 million years ago.

Proteins and other organic remains usually decay soon after an animal dies. During fossilisation, the space they occupied within bone is filled by mineral deposits carried by groundwater.

Finding fossilised soft tissue is very rare indeed.

Fossils that preserve entire organisms (including both hard and soft body parts) are critical to our understanding of evolution and ancient life on Earth. However, these exceptional deposits are extremely rare. New research suggests that the mineralogy of the surrounding earth is key to conserving soft parts of organisms, and finding more exceptional fossils. The work could potentially support the Mars Rover Curiosity in its sample analysis, and speed up the search for traces of life on other planets: here.

Bad news, Jurassic Park fans — the odds of scientists cloning a dinosaur from ancient DNA are pretty much zero. That’s because DNA breaks down over time and isn’t stable enough to stay intact for millions of years. And while proteins, the molecules in all living things that give our bodies structure and help them operate, are more stable, even they might not be able to survive over tens or hundreds of millions of years. In a new paper published in eLife, scientists went looking for preserved collagen, the protein in bone and skin, in dinosaur fossils. They didn’t find the protein, but they did find huge colonies of modern bacteria living inside the dinosaur bones: here.