They compared the dinosaur version with 21 living animals, including humans, chimps, mice, chickens, ostriches, alligators and salmon. But they did retrieve molecules of collagen, a structural protein that appears in slightly different forms in many animals.
Unlike in Jurassic Park, the real-life researchers couldn't recover any DNA from the ancient remains. If they'd had a larger helicopter, we might never have known. Faced with flying a giant femur out of a remote Montana field site, they broke the bone in half so it would fit inside their helicopter. rex bone by a combination of luck, desperation, and sharp eyes ( see Smithsonian, May 2006). But in 2003, scientists Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer discovered some unfossilized material inside a T. To get molecular evidence about dinosaurs, you need some actual molecules-a tall order for a group of animals that died out 65 million years ago. (The movie's ideas had been proposed in the 1970s-a book by paleontologist Robert Bakker, called The Dinosaur Heresies, nicely conveys this change in thinking and the controversy that accompanied it.)
TREX ARMS FOR CHICKENS MOVIE
The movie Jurassic Park popularized the idea of dinosaurs as quick, smart and birdlike. For decades, dinosaurs were thought to be reptiles: big ones, to be sure, but basically cold-blooded, slow-moving, and dim-witted. The dinosaur-ness of birds has been suspected for many years based on anatomical similarities, but the new research is the first molecular evidence. Paleontologists used material discovered in a chance find in 2003 to pin down the link. The closest living relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex are birds such as chickens and ostriches, according to research published today in Science (and promptly reported in the New York Times).
0 kommentar(er)
