Note: this topic was posted 4/24/2008. Thanks blam.
Posted on 04/24/2008 1:37:14 PM PDT by blam
T. rex confirmed as great granddaddy of all birds
19:00 24 April 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway
John Asara, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Mary Schweitzer, North Carolina State University Thomas Holtz, University of Maryland Tyrannosaurus rex, meet the chicken – your third cousin more than 100 million years removed. A new family tree based on protein sequences recovered from dinosaur fossils firms up the dinosaur's avian lineage.
"Palaeontologists have known this overall connection. We have now confirmed it with molecular data," says John Asara, a biochemist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study.
His team compared sequences of a collagen protein recovered from a 68 million-year old T. rex fossil and a half-million year old mastodon (a kind of extinct elephant) with those same sequences from 21 modern animals – including chicken, alligator, elephant and human.
Family tree
The collagen analysed was collected from a T. rex bone found in Montana. "What makes it possible is that it's exceptionally well preserved," says Asara. "You can't walk into a museum and take a bone off a T. rex and get sequence data."
Asara's team had previously sequenced the collagen protein using a technique called mass spectrometry (see our report on the development, Tyrannosaurus rex fossil gives up precious protein).
To build the family tree, Asara and colleague Chris Organ compared the T. rex sequence with collagen from other animals. Those with similar collagen sequences were grouped closely together on the tree, while differences in the sequences suggested the animals had long diverged.
For the most part, the collagen tree captured relationships palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists had little reason to doubt, including T. rex's kinship to birds and the mastodon's ancestry to elephants.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Wonder if them *yard* Rexes ate 6 ft grasshoppers?
You mean the Yardbirds?
(BTW, the Yardbirds evolved into Led Zeppelins)
Yes, but think of the poached eggs!
Answers why the chicken crossed the road. To get away from Granddad
Nah. He was showing the armadillo that it could be done.
I recall that Dr. Feduccia did an especially elegant study of foot structure ontogeny in the two lifeforms, and decided they could not be related. He supervised a female assistant in this study—could it be Mary Schweitzer????
My own inclination is that birds evolved before "the dinosaurs"—and that's based on studies from a decade (or two) ago. Still, I like to think that the critter at the bird feeder harkens back to the epoch of the "terrible lizards".
:)
I put up a bird feeder for finches, chickadees, wrens because they eat the wasps and mosquitoes and are not bad to have around most of the time. The gray jays are attacking the squirrels which is also great. They aren’t eight feet tall like ostriches or 20 feet tall like T Rex but if they were I wouldn’t feed them.
...and Get it on!.........
Ptarmigans descended from dinosaurs. Something rabbits should really reconsider waging war against.
The headline has been changed form the original, and it is factually untrue. On a forum like this, it invites justified derision.
They changed the headline. The headline posted here is the same that was posted on New Scientist at the time of this posting.
Ooops.
Note: this topic was posted 4/24/2008. Thanks blam.
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