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110M-year-old dinosaur discovered with skin and soft tissue
- Communitivity 9y agoAm I the only one getting Jurassic Park potential vibes off of this? The potential genetic information from this find is amazing.
- pmoriarty 9y agoDoes any DNA survive that long? I thought I'd read somewhere that it gets destroyed relatively quickly.
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoHalf life of 521 years.
- mbreese 9y agoAt least add a link... http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555 http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11... From this article, it would appear that DNA would probably be unreadable at around the 1.5M year mark, well short of the 110M years that would be required to recover DNA from this dinosaur.
- sndean 9y agoThere was this, recently: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/no-bones-no-problem-dna-left-cave-soils-can-reveal-ancient-human-occupants http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/no-bones-no-problem-d... That's only 50,000 years, though. Also, no idea what the quality of the DNA is at that point.
- kyberias 9y agoNo it doesn't. Yet Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced.
- fsloth 9y agoIn this case, "intact" means that the tissue was preserved in shape long enough for the sample to fossilize. Not that it actually survived in original chemical composition for 100 million years.
- blakesterz 9y ago"For more than 7,000 hours over the past five years, Mitchell has slowly exposed the fossil’s skin and bone. The painstaking process is like freeing compressed talcum powder from concrete. “You almost have to fight for every millimeter,” he says." Wow! I had no idea this took so long.
- maxxxxx 9y agoArchaeologists are heroes. They spend years painstakingly restoring things. Many of the digs also take many years of tedious work.
- arca_vorago 9y agoI just wish they got more recognition for their work. They do hard things over long periods of time and barely get a headline... which is good that their finds aren't oversensationalized, but, I think they themselves need more direct acknowledgement.
- kyberias 9y agoTitle needs correction: With FOSSILIZED skin and soft tissue.
- jacquesm 9y agoIsn't that kind of obvious given that it is 110M years old or did you interpret this as potential dino-burger material?
- alayne 9y agoWell, the headline says "intact".
- dang 9y agoOk, we've de-intacted the title above.
- jacquesm 9y agoDisagree. Intact for a 110M year old fossil means just that, it does not mean that the tissue has not been fossilized, it means it has not decomposed as it normally would. If soft tissue and skin follow their normal path all you'd have is bones. Intact here means that the material is still present, but in fossilized form (just like fossilized bones are no longer the same as real bones). The 'intact' is very much important here because that means it is not just fragments.
- redthrowaway 9y agoCould anyone explain why being submerged in water would lead to particularly good fossilization? I would have thought it would do the exact opposite.
- bitJericho 9y agoThis is because silt can take the place of cells easily.
- lbolla 9y agoBecause underwater there is less oxygen, less light and nice fine muddy floors.
- lbolla 9y agoI have a friend who believes that Earth is 6000 years old, therefore dinosaurs lived alongside men and went extinct in the Medieval times (by some crazy global-scale dinosaurs hunting). I am so sad that he won't be able to enjoy this discovery as much as I do, because he'll be focused on debunking the scientific assertion that this fossil is 110 million years old.
- Gabriel_Martin 9y agoCan you tell me more about this friend? I have many in my hometown area who are similar, so I'd be curious to hear about other archetypes.
- lbolla 9y agoEvangelical Christian, creationist, he believes the Bible literally (whatever that means, given translations and necessary interpretations). We recently engaged in various conversations and it turned out he believes that Earth is 6000 years old (which has the most bizarre consequences: dinosaurs coeval of men, palaeontology being all wrong, cosmology predicting a 11-billion-years old Universe being a conspiracy of the Devil, etc.), that the Bible predicts Heisenberg uncertainty principle and various other scientific discoveries of the 20th century (therefore, by his logic, science and religion are compatible). He is basically an incarnation of this website: http://answersingenesis.org/ http://answersingenesis.org/ Funny that he used to be the most disrespectful, unconventional and troublesome guy, which is why we became friends in the first place.
- zbyte64 9y agoAnswer In Genesis is willing to make up new miracles not found in the Bible to explain their findings (example: the RATE project). As long as miracles can be used to explain "scientific" findings, there is no profit in debating evidence with a creationist. Source: I was one.
- ardit33 9y agoI once briefly dated a girl that believed in horoscopes and was dead set that it is a pre-determinator of a person's personality. And I knew another girl that believed in the healing power of gem stones. I released that irrational beliefs take many forms, not just religious (which creationism comes from), and it is a common human feature to explain things that you can't understand in ways that might make sense to you.
- perseusprime11 9y agoCan we use some of the skin and soft tissue to recreate the dinosaur using CRISPR?
- giarc 9y agoI believe the issue is that DNAs half life is short (521 years in bone[1]) so after 110 million years, the DNA is pretty degraded. 1. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/ http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/...
- perseusprime11 9y agoIs it possible to use deep learning to fill out the missing parts? I am guessing that DNA is like code with a set of instructions encoded.
- wil421 9y agoYou could always fill in the gaps with amphibian DNA.
- giarc 9y agoI imagine that is a Jurassic Park reference and not an actual suggestion. However, if it is, you would just then end up with a frog.
- wil421 9y agoYou're right we should just build humanoid robots for the guests instead.
- asadlionpk 9y agobuilding either of those leads to violent ends.
- michaelgreshko 9y agoHey, I'm the journalist who wrote the story. A few things: - The organic-rich film preserving the outlines of scales (so, yes, fossilized skin) is only a few millimeters thick. So Mitchell had to prepare the fossil extremely slowly in order to follow the film through the matrix. - The half-life of DNA is ~521 years at 13.1°C, as found in this 2012 paper: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724 The team's model predicts higher half-lifes at truly freezing temperatures, but even at the extreme end, there's no way DNA would survive 110 million years. - The dating on the site is well constrained to ~110 million years old. The fossil was found in the Wabiskaw Member of the Clearwater Formation, a well-dated rock formation in Alberta. The underlying oil sands have been radiometrically dated to 112±5.3 million years old. (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293)
- ChuckMcM 9y agoReally awesome writeup of the find. Is Suncor going to be doing any additional, and somewhat more reserved, excavating to understand whether or not there are other important fossils nearby?
- michaelgreshko 9y agoThanks. Interestingly, this is the first large fossil like this that Suncor had run across, in all the digging they had done up in the oil sands. And as you can imagine, finding a land animal like this nodosaur in the middle of what would've been a shallow sea is extraordinarily unlikely. Other mining companies have found other fossils in similar formations, though usually of non-dinosaur marine reptiles (e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/ancient-sea-monster-battle-revealed-unusual-fossil http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/ancient-sea-monster-b...).
- amelius 9y agoHow much does the DNA degrade (i.e., what does half life mean)? Would it be possible to align any preserved short sequences back together?
- Declanomous 9y ago>Researchers suspect it initially fossilized whole, but when it was found in 2011, only the front half, from the snout to the hips, was intact enough to recover. Is this because of something that happened a long time ago, or because the mining machine ate the back end of the dinosaur? The article doesn't really make it clear.
- ge96 9y agoMy god look at the 'armor' on that thing. Humans are weak! But we can also build bazookas. Thank you asteroid, I would not be here today moving electrons to this server. edit: does rapid-under sea burial mean it drowned? haha
- mrfusion 9y agoI was hoping there might be feathers preserved. Or is that not expected for this species?
- michaelgreshko 9y agoPersonally, I've not seen any evidence that ankylosaurs (including nodosaurs) had feathers. But who knows?
- mrb 9y agoBack in 2005, researchers found soft tissues in a T-rex fossil (hollow blood vessels retaining their original flexibility, elasticity, and resilience): http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/~natsirt/stuff/Schweitzer%20Science%202005.pdf http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/~natsirt/stuff/Schweitzer%20S... IIRC they were cutting the large fossil to transport it, and it is while cutting it that they unexpectedly stumbled upon these soft tissues inside. This discovery was so mind-boggling at the time. What research has been conducted on this specific 2005 T-rex specimen? The scientific community seemed ecstatic after finding it, but I do not remember any significant discovery made from the tissue.
- trollied 9y agoBut how can it be that old if the world is only a few thousand years old? (According to some USA education)
- dang 9y agoPlease don't do this here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14327802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14327802 and marked it off-topic.
- malkia 9y agoBy know everyone should know the Earth is 6000 years old, on both sides of the coin! What is this nonsense :)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- philliphaydon 9y agoSuch an awesome article and photos, I want to see more photos!!! But damn, reading the comments from creationists hurts :(
- WalterBright 9y agoIt's only a matter of time until we stumble on an alien spacecraft buried in the rock.