Dinosaur Bones With Soft Tissue

Neighboring Fossils Different Paleoenvironments

The Qingjiang and Chengjiang biotas are the same age and from the same paleogeographic region but have only an 8% overlap in their taxa. That distinction could suggest that the two deposits developed in response to different paleoenvironmental conditions, the team wrote.

The Qingjiang biota might just be the best yet discovered.

The differences in the biological composition of Qingjiang versus the neighboring Chengjiang biota really highlight the ecological diversity of early animal ecosystems, Anderson said. Burgess Shaletype deposits are of vital importance to our understanding of early animal evolution. The Qingjiang biota might just be the best yet discovered.

With two very different fossil deposits discovered so close together, Zhang and his team continue to hunt for more.

I have been working on Burgess Shaletype fossils for many years and keep searching for good fossil localities and collecting fossils every year, Zhang said. If we can find Burgess Shaletype preservation in the first 20 million years of the Cambrian anywhere in the world, Zhang said, it would be great!

Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Staff Writer

Citation:

Cartier, K. M. S. , Scientists discover pristine collection of soft-tissue fossils, Eos, 100, . Published on 21 March 2019.

Text © 2019. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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A Huge Problem For The Evolutionary Paradigm

Believing proteins could last for tens of millions of years takes enormous faith. According to a report in the science journal The Biochemist, even if collagen were stored at 0°C, it would not be expected to last even three million years.8 But such is the power of the evolutionary paradigm that many choose to believe the seemingly impossible rather than accept the obvious implication, that the samples are not as old as they say.

M. H. SchweitzerLeft:T. rexRight:

National Geographics article titled, Many dino fossils could have soft tissue inside9 reveals that the scientific community is expecting many more examples of dinosaur soft tissue in the future. These facts have been a thorn in their side for several years now as they are incredibly difficult to explain within an evolutionary timeframe. Needless to say, they fit beautifully within a biblical timescale these are almost certainly the remains of creatures that were buried during the Genesis Flood, approximately 4,400 years ago.

I had one reviewer tell me that he didnt care what the data said, he knew that what I was finding wasnt possible . I wrote back and said, Well what data would convince you? And he said, None.11

Alternative Hypotheses For Source Of Soft Tissue/cellular Structures

The possibility remains that despite morphological and functional similarity of fossil cell and tissue components to extant material, no original molecular components may remain . The structures may be the result of an as yet unidentified abiotic or geomicrobiological process that could explain their presence in thousand- to million-year-old fossil remains. Therefore, alternatives to the hypothesis that these structures are remnants of the original material are presented below.

Intravascular microstructures

Vessels

The vessels could be composed of kerogen, operationally defined as organic constituents of sedimentary rocks that is neither soluble in aqueous alkaline solvents nor in common organic solvents , or in other words, organic material remaining after dissolution of surrounding material. The relatively high carbon content of these vessels may fit this definition, but vessel carbon is reduced relative to extant material . Additionally, most described kerogen is not transparent or translucent, as are these vessels, and we have found that at least in some cases, the vessels are easily solubilized in some polar solvents, indicating the possible presence of lipids. Because phospholipids are a significant component of cell membranes, further testing may demonstrate an early stage in polymerization.

Fibrous matrix

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Immunohistochemistry Of T Rex Vessels

Figure 4

T. rex tissues exhibit positive antibody binding to protein components of extant vascular tissue. Are composite images in which fluorescence corresponding to antibody-antigen complexes is overlain upon VLM images of vessel sections, with adjacent images captured using a fluorescent filter. No spurious binding was observed for negative controls in which vessels were exposed to secondary antibodies raised against the host species of all other antibodies used, i.e., mouse and rabbit . Positive binding of dinosaur vessels to actin antibodies can be seen in thin, evenly distributed layers, and more broadly distributed binding is apparent for muscle tropomyosin antibodies. Antibodies to both type I collagen and elastin bind positively to these T. rex vessels. Antibodies raised against ostrich haemoglobin exhibit comparatively lower binding intensity. No reactivity of dinosaur vessels to antibodies against bacterial peptidoglycan was observed.

Thoughts On Is Soft Tissue Common In Dinosaur Bones

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Scientists Find Soft Tissue In 75

• Original: Jun 16, 2015

In a pile of unpromising dinosaur fossils dug up in Canada a century ago, British scientists find soft tissue materials preserved for some 75 million years.

Unlike bones and teeth, which can survive for hundreds of millions of years, soft tissues are among the first materials to disappear during the fossilization process. Even so, scientists have found intact soft tissue in dinosaur bones before. The most famous case dates to 2005, when Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University found collagen fibers in the fossilized leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex. But such discoveries are rare, and have previously occurred only with extremely well preserved fossils. The most extraordinary thing about the new find, which scientists from Imperial College London reported this week in the journal Nature Communications, is that the fossils they examined are of relatively poor condition .

As Susannah Maidment, an Imperial paleontologist and one of the lead researchers on the new study, told the Guardian: Its really difficult to get curators to allow you to snap bits off their fossils. The ones we tested are crap, very fragmentary, and they are not the sorts of fossils youd expect to have soft tissue.

Samples of the mineralized collagen fibers extracted by the team.

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Explainer: How a fossil forms

Susannah Maidment is a paleontologist at Imperial College London in England. She was part of a team that has just found residues of soft tissue in slivers of eight dinosaur bones. These included a toe claw from a theropod. There also was a rib from a duckbilled dinosaur. All had been found about a century ago, mostly in Alberta, Canada. Since then, the bones had been stashed in drawers at the Natural History Museum in London.

The team used a scanning electron microscope to study the bones. This special microscope can highlight features that are just a few billionths of a meter across. The dinosaur bone images revealed what appeared to be red blood cells. A second type of powerful microscope probed the structure of some bone features. These images showed bands similar to patterns formed by collagen in animal bones today. Collagen is a fibrous protein. It is found not only in bones, but also in cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues.

Those results tell us that there are actual original components of blood and collagen preserved in the fossil bones, Maidment says.

The size of a blood cell can tell scientists a lot. For example, smaller red blood cells indicate its host had a faster metabolism. Faster metabolisms are typical of warm-blooded animals.

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Jellies Combs Sponges And Tentacles

Researchers found that the Qingjiang fossils are in a more pristine condition than those from Burgess Shale and Chengjiang.

This is where the Qingjiang biota is truly remarkable, and certainly worthy of attention, by how it presents its members with amazing detail of shapes, antennas or eyes, Hammarlund said. The rocks are much less weathered than at Chengjiang and less cooked than at Burgess Shale.

As if that wasnt enough, she continued, the biota has also preserved its flimsy ones, so both jellyfish, sometimes even with tentacles, and comb jellies appear preserved. This contribution from the Qingjiang will certainly add to our understanding of the evolution, and resilience, of also the most primitive animals..

Whats more, the biota includes fossils of the same taxa spanning larval, juvenile, and adult developmental stages. This discovery could give an unprecedented look into the development of individual species, the team wrote.

More than a third of the Qingjiang biota are cnidarian fossilsstinging creatures like jellyfish, box jellies, and anemones that are thought to have been abundant during the early Cambrian but are underrepresented in the fossil record.

The array of cnidarians provide the tantalizing prospect of illuminating some of the lowest branches of the animal tree, according to Ross Anderson, a paleobiologist at All Souls College at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who was not involved with this study.

Dinosaur Renaissance And Beyond

The field of dinosaur research has enjoyed a surge in activity that began in the 1970s and is ongoing. This was triggered, in part, by John Ostrom‘s discovery and 1969 description of Deinonychus, an active predator that may have been warm-blooded, in marked contrast to the then-prevailing image of dinosaurs as sluggish and cold-blooded.Vertebrate paleontology has become a global science. Major new dinosaur discoveries have been made by paleontologists working in previously unexploited regions, including India, South America, Madagascar, Antarctica, and most significantly China . The widespread application of cladistics, which rigorously analyzes the relationships between biological organisms, has also proved tremendously useful in classifying dinosaurs. Cladistic analysis, among other modern techniques, helps to compensate for an often incomplete and fragmentary fossil record.

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In Seeming Desperation Evolutionists Turn To Iron To Preserve The Idea Of Millions Of Years

M. SchweitzerBrachylophosaurus

by Calvin Smith1

First published 28 January 2014 last updated 28 February 2019

Dinosaur soft tissue in fossil bones!? Nearly every CMI speaker has watched incredulous looks on peoples faces as pictures from a 2005 Science magazine article flash on-screen. These show transparent, branching flexible blood vessels and red blood cells alongside soft and stretchy ligaments from a supposedly 68 million-year-old T.rex bone. The remarkable discoveries by palaeontologist Dr Mary Schweitzer have rocked the scientific world.

Origins And Early Evolution

HerrerasaurusEoraptorPlateosaurusTriassic

Dinosaurs diverged from their archosaur ancestors during the Middle to Late Triassic epochs, roughly 20 million years after the devastating PermianTriassic extinction event wiped out an estimated 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species approximately 252 million years ago.Radiometric dating of the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina where the early dinosaur genusEoraptor was found date it as 231.4 million years old.Eoraptor is thought to resemble the common ancestor of all dinosaurs if this is true, its traits suggest that the first dinosaurs were small, bipedal predators. The discovery of primitive, dinosaur-like ornithodirans such as Lagosuchus and Lagerpeton in Argentina in the Carnian epoch of the Triassic, around 233 million years ago, supports this view analysis of recovered fossils suggests that these animals were indeed small, bipedal predators. Dinosaurs may have appeared as early as the Anisian epoch of the Triassic, 245 million years ago, as evidenced by remains of the genus Nyasasaurus from that period. However, its known fossils are too fragmentary to tell if it was a dinosaur or only a close relative. Paleontologist Max C. Langer et al. determined that Staurikosaurus from the Santa Maria Formation dates to 233.23 million years ago, making it older in geologic age than Eoraptor.

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Controversial T Rex Soft Tissue Find Finally Explained

The controversial discovery of 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to new research, iron in the dinosaurs body preserved the tissue before it could decay.

The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins and possibly even DNA can survive millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana.

What we found was unusual, because it was still soft and still transparent and still flexible, Schweitzer told LiveScience.

T. rex tissue?

The find was also controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions. In most cases, microbes feast on a dead animals soft tissue, destroying it within weeks. The tissue must be something else, perhaps the product of a later bacterial invasion, critics argued.

Then, in 2007, Schweitzer and her colleagues analyzed the chemistry of the T. rex proteins. They found the proteins really did come from dinosaur soft tissue. The tissue was collagen, they reported in the journal Science, and it shared similarities with bird collagen which makes sense, as modern birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs such as T. rex.

Iron lady

Searching for soft tissue

The Soft Tissue In Dinosaur Bone

In 2000, paleontologist Bob Harmon found a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen in the Hell Creek Formation, an area of eastern Montana full of Cretaceous fossils . This T. rex wasn’t very big, at least as far as Tyrannosaurus fossils go. But once it was excavated and wrapped in plaster for shipping, it was too heavy for the waiting helicopter to carry. The team split the fossil in two, breaking one of its femurs in the process. Fragments of the femur made their way to Dr. Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University.

Schweitzer did the opposite of what most paleontologists do with their specimens. Instead of preserving and protecting it, she destroyed it by soaking it in a weak acid. If the entire fossil had been made of rock, it would have dissolved completely. But in the terms used in Schweitzer’s paper — co-authored by Jennifer L. Whittmeyer, John R. Horner and Jan K. Toporski — the acid demineralized the specimen. After seven days, the demineralization process revealed several unexpected tissues, including:

• Small objects that appeared to be osteocytes, the cells that build bone

Because the prevailing scientific theory links dinosaurs and birds from an evolutionary standpoint, Schweitzer and her team compared their samples to the bones of a dead ostrich. They found the samples to be similar. When viewed with a scanning electron microscope, the dinosaur’s cortical bone — the dense part of the bone — was almost indistinguishable from the ostrich’s.

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Nc State Paleontologist Discovers Soft Tissue In Dinosaur Bones

Date:

North Carolina State University

Summary:

Conventional wisdom among paleontologists states that when dinosaurs died and became fossilized, soft tissues didnt preserve the bones were essentially transformed into rocks through a gradual replacement of all organic material by minerals. New research by a North Carolina State University paleontologist, however, could literally turn that theory inside out.

Conventional wisdom among paleontologists states that when dinosaurs died and became fossilized, soft tissues didnt preserve the bones were essentially transformed into rocks through a gradual replacement of all organic material by minerals. New research by a North Carolina State University paleontologist, however, could literally turn that theory inside out.

Dr. Mary Schweitzer, assistant professor of paleontology with a joint appointment at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, has succeeded in isolating soft tissue from the femur of a 68-million-year-old dinosaur. Not only is the tissue largely intact, its still transparent and pliable, and microscopic interior structures resembling blood vessels and even cells are still present.

In a paper published in the March 25 edition of the journal Science, Schweitzer describes the process by which she and her technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, isolated soft organic tissue from the leg bone of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.

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