Here's a real dinosaur they can study
Posted on 03/24/2005 5:31:46 PM PST by wagglebee
GGG (Dinosaur) ping
IIRC - this is an April Fools hoax...
Is it? I was not aware of it.
Uh...are we talking Jurassic Park here?
Any DNA is long gone. What is this, the 3rd article on this today?
Here's a real dinosaur they can study
Where do you get your information regarding lack of DNA?
PING, see Y'all tomorrow!
There was another article a few years back about recovering DNA from some semi-preserved creature from way back. The idea was that DNA is not particularly stable and decays over time.
Jurassic Park, reality patterned after the movie. Life imitates art.
"Life finds a way to survive."
Now only if that were true in Florida. :(
I mapped soils in that area back in 1989 and am familiar with that geologic formation. Brought back a couple of boxes of dinosaur bones myself. I have a vivid memory of pulling a clam shell out of the sandstone...the mother-of-pearl was still clear and colorful, although the shell was 70 million years old. It looked like something I just picked up off the beach.
In Montana's cool, dry climate, things just don't rot very quickly.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
"as Dr. Schweitzer's group noted, in those cases their shapes may be replicated but their original composition is not preserved"
This is going to turn out to be the case with this dinosaur "tissue". But it's still an interesting story. Around 1999 there was a claim of millions of years-old DNA having been sequenced, but that was rejected as a methodological error.
here are some oldies, probably long gone, related:
Monsters on Ice:
http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-04/features/monsters-on-ice/
Killer Cancer in the Cretaceous
By Kathy A. Svitil
November 03, 2003 (not sure about this, it won't load or do anything else)
http://www.discover.com/web-exclusives/killer-cancer1102/
Poles find 40-mln-year-old lizard in amber
Tuesday, February 03, 1998 (dead link, try the web archive)
http://www.thenoiseroom.com/archnews/nd/archive/3298.htm
Polish scientists are studying a lizard that has been preserved in Baltic amber for 40 million years, the head of Warsaw's Museum of the Earth said Monday. "This is important as lizards have been found in Dominican amber, but for Baltic amber this is a real rarity due to the state of conservation," said Krzysztof Jakubowski, director of the museum under the Polish Academy of Sciences. "We will only know what academic significance it may have after detailed research," Jakubowski said. The lizard, the second known to have been discovered in amber on the Baltic coast in a century, was found near the city of Gdansk by a local jeweller who passed it on to the museum.
And what proof is there that that formation is 70 million years old?
Personally, I have my doubts about the age of things like this. It usually goes to some construction of circular logic.
Big Bird with teeth and a big appetite.
More on the megafauna....hope I used that term correctly.
No it is not
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