T. rex thigh reveals chicken family ties

From ErrorICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- Tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur bone have given scientists the first genetic proof that the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant cousin to the modern chicken."It's the first molecular evidence of this link between birds and dinosaurs," said John Asara, a Harvard Medical School researcher, whose results were published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.Scientists have long suspected that birds evolved from dinosaurs based on a study of dinosaur bones, but until recently, no soft tissue had survived to confirm the link.That all changed in 2005 when Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University reported finding soft tissue, including blood vessels and cells, in a T. rex bone dug out of sandstone from the fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation in Montana.Schweitzer, in another study appearing in this week's issue of Science, found that extracts of T. rex bone reacted with antibodies to chicken collagen, further suggesting the presence of birdlike protein in dinosaur bones.For his study, Asara used a highly sensitive technology called mass spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of bone fragments provided by Schweitzer and her team.He first had to purify the bone extract, which came in the form of a gritty brown powder that remained after minerals were extracted. Asara then broke it down into peptide fragments, little bits of proteins, isolated into the amino acid sequences that make them up.

Leading to the inevitable question ... does it taste like chicken?

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"It was very tough to get anything," he said in a telephone interview. He wound up with seven separate strands of amino acid, five of which were a particular class of collagen, a fibrous protein found in bone.

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Ultimately, scientists had hoped to find genetic material that was unique to the T. rex. That was not possible with the tiny T. rex sample.

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That's not much ... and it shows how degraded the remaining "soft tissue" (to use the media spin terminology) was by time and the fossilization process.Also see Blood in dino bones for previous thread on this TRex find.Enjoy.

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Leading to the inevitable question ... does it taste like chicken?

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The thought occurred to me What was surprising to me is not that they managed to find a biochemical link to chickens, but that they were able to salvage even the slightest amount of protiens what so ever.