Some recent dinosaur discoveries (for Thomas, the mammal):

Dinosaur reclassified as crocodile

June 23, 2005

The find suggests that, rather than rising together, meat-eating theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex existed long before the plant-eating ornithischians, researchers said in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences.

Traditionally these teeth were thought to belong to the ornithischians (bird-hipped). Admittedly, I don't know much and am confused. Nothing new, I know, but still.

From LiveScience:

"This find is a great thing for the crocodilian record, too," Parker said. "Here's this totally unrecognized group of possibly herbivorous crocodilians," Parker said.

The sort of crocodiles one can get comfortable with...but, let me see now, they thought the teeth belonged to the herbivorous ornithischians (do you get carniverous ones?), but it turns out they belonged to herbivorous crocodiles? I had better go read those articles again. The main gist of this excursion into the treacherous mists of paleontology is that they've been classifying dinosaurs, especially those bird-hipped ones, the friendly plant-eating ones, using teeth only, and now they're going to have to go back and rethink the whole thing. We'll give them some time.

Eastern Montana's B. rex now yields female bone tissue

June 02, 2005

Okay, blogging is such that you'll have to read the entry below this one first if you want to get the sequence right (which you don't really need to but for those pedants among us...).

Here we have something they've apparently been looking for all these years, bone tissue of a kind that can be used to identify the gender of the original owner of said tissue, the dinosaur. The tissue is common in birds (which, like dinosaurs used to, lay eggs - pertinent to this discussion), and has been conspicuously absent from dinosaurs, until, as they say, now.

The Tyrannosaurus rex known as B. rex has now yielded bone tissue that is common in female birds, said Mary Higby Schweitzer.

What I said.

The discovery not only means that B. rex was female, but it signifies the end of a scientific treasure hunt, according to Schweitzer who announced her discovery in the June 3 issue of the journal Science.

Researchers have long predicted they would find medullary tissue in dinosaurs, but they hadn't found it until it appeared in the hind thigh bones of B. rex, Schweitzer said. Scientists expected to find the tissue in dinosaurs because other evidence linking birds and dinosaurs is so robust and all female birds have medullary tissue.

Exactly. It's obvious I find myself on a sure footing with this article. I can flaunt it, I can move it, move it. Nevermind

Schweitzer said she was trying to get at the microstructure of the bone by partially removing the mineral when she came across the soft tissue and blood vessels that led to her first paper in Science. That paper was published March 25 and led to a storm of publicity because the finding was significant, unexpected and controversial.

Which leads us, in this temporal labyrinth, to the next/previous entry.

Blood vessels recovered from T. rex bone

March 24, 2005

I found this (and I suspect I'm not the only one) just so extraordinary:

Palaeontologists have extracted soft, flexible structures that appear to be blood vessels from the bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago. They also have found small red microstructures that resemble red blood cells.

Soft tissue. Blood vessels. In rock?! Preserved through all the shit that rocks have to go through to become...rocks. Temperatures and pressures. Soft and stretchy and lithification. They don't belong together. Surely? Is nothing sacred anymore?

"[The T. rex paper] suggests that biological and biochemical information might be recoverable from a wide range of fossil material," says Angela Milner of the Natural History Museum, in London, UK, who has detected proteins in Iguanadon bone. "There certainly seem to be blood vessels," she told New Scientist.