Posted on 10/01/2006 8:12:10 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
IF they can recover any DNA information at all--which is very doubtful--it will surely show significant similarities with human and other vertebrate DNA. The evolutionarily highly conserved HOX genes are needed during development of all vertebrate embryos to establish the basic bilateral symmetry of the body plan, limbs, and the location of major organs.
I'm afraid I'm extremely skeptical that we'll get anything. We've got 6 billion base pairs in our diploid genomes, dinosaurs were no doubt up there in the billions as well. If we do get anything it would be tiny fragments, probably just a few base pairs long (long enough to code for two or three amino acids in a chain that originally was probably several hundred amino acids long), and completely without context. We wouldn't know what gene they went into and what the reading frame was. Without a proper reading frame it would be hopeless anyway!
Your are correct, but the vultures circle anything that resembles dead meat. We have had many threads on the topic -- all flame wars.
More than anything else, this was a wake up call to Paleontologists around the world that their huge stores of dinosaur bones may contain soft tissue treasures unsuspected for generations. Undoubtedly, they are now trying to find some non-invasive process to examine bones without breaking them.
No, it would taste like ostrich. Ostrich doesn't taste like chicken, it tastes like ... um ... dinosaur.
And I should know, I have eaten both. At least, I have if the theory about alligator being a living dinosaur is true ...
What's it taste like?
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