Posted on 10/03/2009 7:50:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Two years ago, Schweitzer gazed through a microscope in her laboratory at North Carolina State University and saw lifelike tissue that had no business inhabiting a fossilized dinosaur skeleton: fibrous matrix, stretchy like a wet scab on human skin; what appeared to be supple bone cells, their three-dimensional shapes intact; and translucent blood vessels that looked as if they could have come straight from an ostrich at the zoo.
By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from the bones. It's a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T. rex walked what's now the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. But Schweitzer tends to ignore such dogma. She just looks and wonders, pokes and prods, following her scientific curiosity. That has allowed her to see things other paleontologists have missed—and potentially to shatter fundamental assumptions about how much we can learn from the past. If biological tissue can last through the fossilization process, it could open a window through time, showing not just how extinct animals evolved but how they lived each day. "Fossils have richer stories to tell—about the lub-dub of dinosaur life—than we have been willing to listen to," says Robert T. Bakker, curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. "This is one spectacular proof of that."
At the same time, the contents of those T. rex bones have also electrified some creationists, who interpret Schweitzer's findings as evidence that Earth is not nearly as old as scientists claim. "I invite the reader to step back and contemplate the obvious," wrote Carl Wieland on the Answers in Genesis Web site last year. "This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most."
Rhetoric like this has put Schweitzer at the center of a raging cultural controversy, because she is not just a pioneering paleontologist but also an evangelical Christian. That fact alone has prompted some prominent paleontologists to be even more skeptical about her scientific research. Some creationists have questioned her work from the other direction, pressing her to refute Darwinian evolution. But in her religious life, Schweitzer is no more of an ideologue than she is in her scientific career. In both realms, she operates with a simple but powerful consistency: The best way to understand the glory of the world is to open your eyes and take an honest look at what is out there.
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There’s no reason why you can’t preserve collagen tissue for millions of years. Place the tissue in an environment that precludes decay from bacteria, then let it dehydrate while encased in material that turns to rock. Move ahead millions of years... break open the rock and rehydrate. The tough part is preventing the decay, but I could imagine this happening under certain scenarios. Such as the tissue drying very quickly after death or the animal being buried within material such as volcanic ash that cuts off oxygen.
As to how such long term DNA preservation could occur, Asimov’s line comes to mind: “The universe is not only stranger than we think it is, it is more strange than we can think it is.”
Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass SpectrometryFossilized bones from extinct taxa harbor the potential for obtaining protein or DNA sequences that could reveal evolutionary links to extant species. We used mass spectrometry to obtain protein sequences from bones of a 160,000- to 600,000-year-old extinct mastodon (Mammut americanum) and a 68-million-year-old dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). The presence of T. rex sequences indicates that their peptide bonds were remarkably stable. Mass spectrometry can thus be used to determine unique sequences from ancient organisms from peptide fragmentation patterns, a valuable tool to study the evolution and adaptation of ancient taxa from which genomic sequences are unlikely to be obtained.
John M. Asara, Mary H. Schweitzer,
Lisa M. Freimark, Matthew Phillips,
Lewis C. Cantley
Science 13 April 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5822, pp. 280 - 285
DOI: 10.1126/science.1137614
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