Cool National Geographic show on a mummified dinosaur this w

[Tikker]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071203/sc_ ... mummy_dc_1

Kid in North Dakota found it in 2000

Most complete dinosaur remain found to date I think. the neat part of course that a lot of the soft tissues were intact (fossilized, but intact, not just an impression in clay)

stripes, scales, etc etc

pretty cool stuff

[Lyion]

That is cool.

I wonder how it ended up partially mummified.

[Ouchyfish]

Couldn't afford a proper burial.


(VERY cool btw!!)

[araby]

Neat!! That was a very awkward way to end that article though...haha "back end"

so the croc crawled up its ass and got stuck...well alrighty then!

[Narrock]

I wonder if they'll be able to get some DNA from the skin tissue.

[Ouchyfish]

soft tissues were intact (fossilized, but intact

doubtful..fossilized=useless for DNA.

I watched a special a few weeks ago on whether we could do what they claimed in Jurassic park. The bottom line from all of the scientists was pretty much no.

A full set of DNA does carry the blue prints of the creature of which it is a part of. However, this code is made up of billions of individual "base pairs" (like letters in an alphabet) and the order of these are very important to the code. DNA is relatively fragile and breaks down over time. The DNA we are likely to recover will have disintegrated into tiny pieces and most of it will be missing. Unfortunately we cannot just replace the missing section with frog DNA. If we did that we would wind up with frog DNA with a few tiny dinosaur sections rather than dino DNA with a few frog sections.


Fuckin downer lol

[Tikker]

soft tissues were intact (fossilized, but intact

doubtful..fossilized=useless for DNA.

I watched a special a few weeks ago on whether we could do what they claimed in Jurassic park. The bottom line from all of the scientists was pretty much no.

I'm trying to figure out what your point is? no one mentioned anything about DNA. the difference here is that it's actual fossilized soft tissue, not just a clay/mud impression of the tissue

[Ouchyfish]

soft tissues were intact (fossilized, but intact

doubtful..fossilized=useless for DNA.

I watched a special a few weeks ago on whether we could do what they claimed in Jurassic park. The bottom line from all of the scientists was pretty much no.

I'm trying to figure out what your point is? no one mentioned anything about DNA. the difference here is that it's actual fossilized soft tissue, not just a clay/mud impression of the tissue

Read the fucking thread and keep up, man.

I wonder if they'll be able to get some DNA from the skin tissue.

Sorry if by quoting you I made it look like my message was directed -at- you.

[Tikker]

I knew it would happen sooner or later, hah

I was goofing around with settings and had a bunch of people on the ignore option, so i didn't see mindia's post at all

[Gaazy]

suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure!

[Naethyn]

soft tissues were intact (fossilized, but intact

doubtful..fossilized=useless for DNA.

I watched a special a few weeks ago on whether we could do what they claimed in Jurassic park. The bottom line from all of the scientists was pretty much no.

A full set of DNA does carry the blue prints of the creature of which it is a part of. However, this code is made up of billions of individual "base pairs" (like letters in an alphabet) and the order of these are very important to the code. DNA is relatively fragile and breaks down over time. The DNA we are likely to recover will have disintegrated into tiny pieces and most of it will be missing. Unfortunately we cannot just replace the missing section with frog DNA. If we did that we would wind up with frog DNA with a few tiny dinosaur sections rather than dino DNA with a few frog sections.


Fuckin downer lol

But what if a mosquito bit a dinosaur and then flew to a sap tree and then was imprisoned in ember for all this time!? Surely that would preserve it.

[Tikker]

michael crichton called and wants his book idea back

[Ouchyfish]

DNA, often called the blueprint of life, is found in every cell in a living body. It is not unreasonable that we might be able to extract some dino DNA from the blood cells we recover. After that, though, we run into trouble. Scientists have already extracted DNA fragments from an extinct weevil that was trapped in amber some 120 to 135 million years ago. Note that it was only a fragment of DNA of the weevil (less than one millionth of the entire sequence), and not the blood of something it bit.

A full set of DNA does carry the blue prints of the creature of which it is a part of. However, this code is made up of billions of individual "base pairs" (like letters in an alphabet) and the order of these are very important to the code. DNA is relatively fragile and breaks down over time. The DNA we are likely to recover from the stomach of an insect will have disintegrated into tiny pieces and most of it will be missing. Unfortunately we cannot just replace the missing section with frog DNA. If we did that we would wind up with frog DNA with a few tiny dinosaur sections rather than dino DNA with a few frog sections.

It's going to be difficult for scientists to even be sure they have a fragment of dino DNA and not a part of the insect or contamination from something under the researchers fingernails. Remember nobody has ever seen dinosaur DNA before so we they can only identify it by comparing and contrasting it to DNA from animals alive today.

If we were going to fill in missing section of dinosaur DNA it would be more logical to borrow it from birds since they seem to be the closest living creatures to a dinosaur.

DNA is often likened to a software program on a computer because it contains instructions on how to build a living creature. (Whereas the instructions in a computer program might tell the machine how to do your taxes.) To do something on a computer, though, you need not only the software, but the hardware (the computer itself) to run it. In the same way, we are missing the "hardware" needed to execute the DNA. This would normally be a mommy dinosaur that produces an egg with the DNA in it. Unfortunately not any old chicken egg will do it. We need a dinosaur egg. Probably one from the same species we are trying to duplicate. Could we alter something like an Ostrich egg for this purpose? Maybe, but today we don't know how to do it, or what kind of changes are needed.

[Arlos]

There are a whole host of problems with reconstructing DNA from fossilized remains. Honestly, even in cases where we have sequenced the entire genome, we STILL don't k now how things work. For example, in humans, most of our DNA is outside the genes, it apparently doesn't even do anything. Same thing with other organisms. Yet when we've manipulated the DNA of simpler organisms to remove all the "junk" DNA, the creatures in question die almost immediately. So, it's clear that the inter-genomic regions of DNA have some vital function, but what that is we have no idea, since it's the genes where all the proteins and such are made.

As a result, reassembling the DNA of a completely extinct animal is going to be basically impossible. We may get fragments, but with even foreseeable future technology, we would have no idea how to assemble them. Even in the cases of stuff like those frozen wooly mammoths, we're not likely to get useable DNA, and they aren't even fossilized. While you can preserve DNA by freezing cells, it has to be done under specific conditions, or you get ice crystals forming inside the cells. Ice crystals are spiky and sharp, and puncture the cell nuclei and cell membranes as they grow, scrambling the DNA and reducing it to tiny fragments. Still, at least it's POSSIBLE we could get intact DNA from frozen creatures pulled out of the tundra, if exceedingly unlikely. But from fossilized remains? Not likely, especially considering DNA molecules are huge and incredibly fragile as a result.

-Arlos