Thursday, March 24, 2005

Scientists Find Soft Tissue in T-Rex Bone

"A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil dug out of a hunk of sandstone has yielded soft tissue, including blood vessels and perhaps even whole cells, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday."

And yes, preliminary analysis suggests it may be cloneable. (Insert reference to best-selling Michael Crichton novel here.)
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15 comments:

Unknown said...

That is the single most amazing find I can imagine science has had in the past 50 years, and it's not even headline news.

7:51 PM
Anonymous said...

Whats that rumble????
a dinosaur??

no, just a bunch of creationist :D

8:33 PM
Anonymous said...

Whats that rumble????
a dinosaur??

no, just a bunch of creationist :D

9:04 PM
Anonymous said...

Where WOULD they put the sucker? Seems like it would, indeed, take one helluvan electric fence to confine him or her. Then, yes, if you had a power outage.... (And of course, there will be the inevitable "Name the T. Rex" contest.)
--WMB

9:50 PM
Anonymous said...

Whats that rumble???? a dinosaur?? no, just a bunch of creationist :D

This started me thinking. According to my understanding of creationism, when God created the world in 4004 B.C., He included dinosaur fossils as a test of faith and even buried them at a stratitographic level that would make it APPEAR as though they were tens or hundreds of millions of years old (as a further test of faith). However, if we're ever actually able to clone a dinosaur from recovered soft tissue, wouldn't this imply that God also created the DNA of wholly imaginary, non-existent creatures and packed it in with the fossils? On the other hand, if you say, like some creationists, that the dinosaurs were around when Adam and Eve lived, then what about all those dinosaur fossils that appear to be tens and hundreds of millions of years old? God took real bones -- and soft tissue! --and "aged" them, then re-buried them a lot deeper? Seems like there are simpler ways to test our faith, like letting Bush be elected president!
--WMB

10:39 PM
Anonymous said...

Oh, shit. I just realized that finding the soft tissue actually gives creationists an angle to argue that the dinosaur fossils aren't really nearly as old as evolutionists think. Shit.
--WMB

10:47 PM
Unknown said...

WMB - all letting bush get re-elected has done is test my patience ;)

10:49 PM
Ken said...

Didn't they try to clone a mammoth a while back?

11:09 PM
Anonymous said...

Didn't they try to clone a mammoth a while back?

Yes. Or at least they were making noises about doing it. A beastie that they found more or less intact in Arctic ice, I think. I was wondering about what happened to the "Clone the Wooly Mammoth" project too.
--WMB

10:11 AM
Anonymous said...

Where is a dinosaur supposed to live though? I thought that this planet had become rather inhospitable to their kind, and that this is why we don't have any huge reptiles and large insects.

11:05 AM
JohnFen said...

Recent mammoth cloning news. It sounds like they haven't even begun to begin.

1:09 PM
RJU said...

I think finding soft tissue and intact DNA are not exactly the same thing. It is unlikely the DNA would be intact after millions of years. If it is intact maybe the earth really is only 4004 years old... In that case it will be a problem explain the hundreds of thousands of yearly cycles they have counted in the ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica and thousands of other similar observations the creationists choose to ignore. I wonder if God created all these things to fool us, why not assume the Bible is a similar ruse? It would be a whole lot easier to create one little book to fool us, than essentially an entire world of contrary evidence.

1:17 PM
Anonymous said...

You could probably apply similar logic to contend that the Earth is actually flat. God creates the illusion that it is round to test our faith. And if the Bible said the Earth is flat (actually, it does imply this in places but does not state it explicitly), that's probably what evangelicals would argue. Basically, creationists don't believe in science period. Creationism is only a theory? Bullshit. It isn't EVEN a theory. For something to BE a theory, it has to have at least a scientific basis. If you don't believe in science, you don't get to have a theory! (On top of their "invincible ignorance," creationists want to have it both ways.)
--WMB

2:23 PM
Ken said...

I wonder if God created all these things to fool us, why not assume the Bible is a similar ruse?

Hahaha! Good one, RJU. I'll have to remember it the next time I am being harrassed by fundamentalist aggitators.

3:07 PM
Unknown said...

I'm afraid that Occam's Razor is a tool of the Devil, RJU

5:07 PM

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