Study supports dinosaur-chicken link

Call it the paleontological equivalent of squeezing blood from a stone. Using highly-sensitive instruments and techniques more typically employed to study human disease...

Call it the paleontological equivalent of squeezing blood from a stone. Using highly-sensitive instruments and techniques more typically employed to study human disease, scientists at Harvard Medical School have for the first time isolated and identified proteins from a dinosaur — a Tyrannosaurus Rex that roared its last 68 million years ago.

Some of the protein identified in the ferociously fanged Cretaceous-era predator were a close match to protein found in modern-day chickens — which the authors say lends more credence to theories that birds are descended from dinosaurs.

The findings, being published in two articles in Science magazine, shattered the long-held assumption that protein and other basic materials of life could not possibly survive in detectable amounts for more than a few hundred thousand years. The research also raised the possibility that scientists might eventually recover DNA from prehistoric beasts, allowing for an even more sophisticated analysis of ancient organisms and the processes of evolution.

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“People are going to be looking differently at prehistoric bones because now we see they may carry tissue and information that nobody believed could still exist,” said Mary Higby Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and a co-author of both articles.

Scientists at Harvard were able to isolate seven tiny strips of collagen protein from soft tissue found in the thigh bone of a tyrannosaurus rex fossil recovered earlier in the decade from beneath 60 feet of sandstone ledge in Montana’s Hell Creek formation.

“At the very least, this breakthrough shows we can look at (protein) sequences that are many, many millions of years old,” said John M Asara, director of the mass spectrometry core facility at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and a lead researcher on the experiments. “That’s a first.”

The same researchers also reported that they isolated 70 protein sequences from a mastodon that died more than 160,000 years ago. Until now, the oldest positively-identified proteins were recovered from the bones of a mammoth reckoned to be a couple hundred thousand years old, according to Schweitzer. DNA has been taken from the 38,000-year-old bones of a Neanderthal, believed to be a prehistoric relative of modern humans.

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Paleontologists not involved in the T Rex protein research said it represented an astonishing piece of scientific sleuth work. But there was doubt whether the experiment will have much practical effect on the study of prehistoric life. There may never be enough dinosaur soft tissue discovered for meaningful scientific scrutiny.

Scientists were quick to discount any suggestion that the sequencing of protein from a T Rex might represent a first step toward cloning dinosaurs, as in Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park and the movies that followed. Cloning would require DNA, which deteriorates more rapidly than protein.

–Colin Nickerson