Posted on 06/02/2005 2:06:01 PM PDT by dread78645
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur that died 68 million years ago has provided some of the strongest evidence yet that birds are the closest-living relatives of dinosaurs, scientists said on Thursday.
Soft tissue found in the animal's thighbone strongly suggests it was a female, and just about to lay eggs, the researchers report.
The bone tissue is strongly similar to that made inside the bones of female birds -- and no other living type of animal -- when they are producing the hard shells of eggs just before they lay them, said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
"In addition to demonstrating gender, it also links the reproductive physiology of dinosaurs to birds very closely. It indicates that dinosaurs produced and shelled their eggs much more like modern birds than like modern crocodiles," Schweitzer told reporters in a telephone briefing.
Female birds produce a layer of bone tissue called medullary bone when they are laying eggs. It is rich in calcium, providing minerals that would otherwise be leached from harder bone material, leaving the bird susceptible to fractures.
"The way that crocodiles lay and shell their eggs is they hold them in their reproductive tract and shell them all at once," Schweitzer said.
"Birds shell their eggs one at a time as they move down through the reproductive tract. It is a pretty calcium-intensive process."
ALREADY A STAR
This particular T. rex fossil made headlines in March when the same team of paleontologists reported it contained preserved soft tissue -- the first ever found in a dinosaur bone.
"The reason that we have found all the things in this one particular animal is this specimen was in a very remote part of Montana, in the Hell Creek formation," said Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies and Montana State University.
"It was so far out in the country that we needed to helicopter it out and we actually had to split the thighbone into two pieces to get it into the helicopter."
When Schweitzer unwrapped the cracked-open femur she immediately saw the soft tissue and went to work proving its remarkable state of preservation.
Horner plans to crack open some other bones.
"We have 12 specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex here at this institution, and we are about to find out if any more of them are females, just by looking inside," he said.
It was a stroke of luck to find an animal at just the right stage to be making medullary bone, Schweitzer said.
"It would not be present in a brooding animal," she said.
"But it would be present as long as there was an egg left to lay. The animal was probably near the end of its laying cycle."
Finding another such specimen will be difficult.
"I think it is pretty much a long shot," she said.
In April, Tamaki Sato of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and colleagues reported they had found the fossil of a dinosaur in China that carried two eggs in its body.
Its physiology also was closer to modern birds than to modern crocodiles, Sato reported.
Horner said most experts are convinced the two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods were closely related to living birds.
"This is another piece to the puzzle and there are a lot of them," he said. "Anyone who would argue that birds and dinosaurs are not related -- frankly I'd put them in the Flat Earth Society group."
Bah...
Uh.... just WHAT 'features' do dead dinos have?
Yup... that link just about stomps on all of us creationists by it's strong evidences pointing to it's claim, alright.
Depends on WHERE you lost it.
Now if you'd been to Wendy's lately........
Do Egyptian records tell anything about the Hebrews that lived among them?
Joseph? Moses? ???
Concerning Egyptian records ....
OK...
WHY are all these folks speaking and writing vastly different languages?
It's basically the bone structures of dinosaurs, particularly theropods that are similar to modern day birds.
First Ever Fossil Of Sleeping Dinosaur Found In China
Today we know that theropod dinosaurs and birds share more than 100 anatomical features, including a wishbone, swiveling wrists, and three forward-pointing toes.
Many are of the opinion that birds are not descendants of dinosaurs and did not evolve from them but rather modern birds are descendants of birds. They are considered by many scientists to be a branch of the dinosaur family that survived, probably because they could fly away from predators. There have been reported fossils of birds found that are 290 million years old.
(Refer back to 163)
Try pouring a big bunch of sand or something on a sleeping bird, and just SEE if it stays in that postition to die!
No one knows for certainty yet how dinosaurs may have slept but the similarity in bone structures is definitely there.
Tha languages all belong to the Indo-European language group, so they're all related. Why are they different? Because the people involved live in different parts of Europe.
Or did you have an actual question?
Maybe I should say...
Leftists always claim to support tolerance and diversity, but often end up insulting and name-calling anyone who disagrees with them.....
I don't know. I doubt there would be much in the records talking about the daily lives of slaves and lower-caste people. Up until recently, the written records of most societies did not focus much on the doings of poorer people in society.
It could be a little bit of both. Flood stories probably floated around in most cultures based on the end of the last ice age. At some point, the stories might well have been formalized, much like Homer (or a group of Greek poets) formalized the story of the Trojan wars.
meaning... a more recent local flood may have caused an author or group to craft an epic about The Big Flood, cannibalizing bits and pieces of older tradition which were folklore concerning the flood at the end of the Ice Age?
makes sense.
impossible to determine either way, but makes sense.
I'm speculating, of course. In Europe and Asia, at least, the stories about the melting of the last ice age would also be intertwined with stories of the flood caused by the Mediterranean eroding through the Bosporus and creating the Black Sea (about 10,000 YA, IIRC).
I think the bottom line is that it's not surprising that Hebrew writers picked up a flood story to include in their creation mythology. There's plenty of real-world material to work with there.
true, true.
Please study some basic biology and/or organic chemistry before making ridiculous assertions such as this. Soft tissue decays as a result of bacterial action. It can be degraded as a result of reaction with oxygen in the atmosphere. Isolate a sample of soft tissue in an environment with limited oxygen and free from bacteria, and it can be preserved indefinitely. The inside of a bone could, under the correct fossilization conditions, be just such an environment.
Please reread the article. This article only mentions in passing the finding of soft tissue. The structure of the bones is what makes the case for the bird/dino relationship. The finding of a particular bone structure that in modern organisms is known to occur only in birds is the evidence, not the existence of soft tissue. Study of the soft tissue is interesting in its own right, but is not the main evidence being presented here.
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