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Finally, In 2011, samples of amber from the Cretaceous era were discovered that contained preserved feathers. This led paleontologist to conclude that “some of the feathers were used for insulation, and not flight.” T. rex juveniles are extremely rare in the fossil record. Some scientists suggest this is because many juveniles survived to adulthood, but it could also be due to a fossil hunters’ bias, to seek out and find big specimens. There’s also the possibility that scientists have simply been misidentifying another related, much smaller species of tyrannosaur, called Nanotyrannus lancensis, that might instead represent T. rex juveniles. Nanotyrannus frequently pops up in the same fossil beds as T. rex, however, a 2010 study examining the skull of a hallmark Nanotyrannus specimen found distinct differences in the sinus and brain casing features. Only further fossil finds will confirm whether Nanotyrannus is a baby T. rex or a distinct species. When he said, “We’re not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur.” he meant we can’t take DNA from a mosquito and even fossils and then ‘make’ a dinosaur. All seriousness aside, I think the next 10 years are going to be very interesting in the world of dinosaurs. At least there is a sense of hope, a glimmer of light, that promises to answer many many more questions about dinosaurs.
That’s why this collagen find is so important. We can’t clone a Dino from collagen but we sure can learn a lot. In fact, we can learn more from proteins than we could from DNA anyway. These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur.” Chris Organ In June of last year, the Smithsonian reached an agreement with the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the skeleton is on loan to the Smithsonian for the next 50 years. At 80 to 85 percent of a full T. rex skeleton, the Wankel T. rex is among the most complete fossils of its kind unearthed, second only to the Chicago Field Museum’s “Sue,” which the Smithsonian tried to acquire in 1997. Beyond these stunning skeletal displays, paleontologists have found some 50 T. rex specimens, since Henry Fairfield Osborn first described the species in 1905. A reconstruction of the two Tyrannosaurus rex caught in the act of mating at the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.Horner is actually the real person whom Dr. Alan Grant’s character is based on! He found a fossilized T. rex femur in 2003 in Montana. It was big. So big that it didn’t fit into the helicopter. Ok, so here’s the-big-idea. Collagen is a protein and proteins are important because they tell us a lot about an organism. The king of reptiles, though mighty and well documented in the fossil record, remains largely a mystery to paleontologists who have yet to understand the creature’s basic lifestyle and biology. We've culled scientific reports to bring you five questions that have yet to be answered: Once Horner got his T. rex home, Mary H. Schweitzer of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences found some soft-tissue preserved inside the T. rex bone.
Oh, I just thought of something. If that is true, then it also answers a few age-old questions. Like: Until a specimen is found with preserved imprints of feathers, though, the jury is out. “We have some opportunity to know if they had feathers because we can find impressions,” says Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the National Museum of Natural History. “But it’s highly unlikely that we will ever know its color or the texture of its skin.”
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Collagen is the main component of connective tissue and one of the most abundant proteins in living animals. The Yutyrannus, described in 2012, are the largest known dinosaurs with feathers—a patch of fossilized skin shows shaggy body feathers, similar to an Emu. Yutyrannus was related to T. rex and measured 30 feet long and weighed more than 3,000 pounds.” Illustration by Brian Choo.
We have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast. We’re just not going to be able to do what they did in ‘Jurassic Park.’ We’re not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur.” Horner The ominous roar of a T. rex, made familiar by the Jurassic Park movies, is nothing more than the product of a filmmaker’s creative imagination. Scientists look to modern relatives of the T. rex—birds and reptiles—for indications of what the dinosaurs might have sounded like, if they made any vocalizations at all. In reality, their calls may have been more like a shriek or a grumble than a roar. “We can guess that it might have sounded like a crocodile or an ostrich, but definitely not a lion and therefore no roaring or purring,” says Carrano.Chance of an answer: Not out of the realm of possibility. “I think with the new methods of muscle reconstruction and 3D modeling out there, we will definitely narrow down the possibilities of uses for the forelimb,” says Burch. The Nation’s T. rex contains one of most complete forelimbs in the fossil record. “That could lead us to something,” says Carrano. As for T. rex babies: Perhaps the young were born with a fluffy feather coat, a common phenomenon in birds, and then lost the majority of their feathers once they reached adulthood. “The bigger you are the harder it is to lose heat,” says Schweitzer. “So, when you’re little, as most critters are when they hatch out, you need insulation or their metabolism would have to be fast enough to maintain body temperature.” Studying changes in proteins can actually give us more insights about evolution than just looking at the DNA. Proteins can yield clues about the age of a sample or about the environment in which an animal lived or was buried. Schweitzer The 2nd evidence is feathers. Over the years you may have noticed that there have been more and more pictures of dinosaurs with feathers. Our traditional ideas about what Velociraptors, or even the T-Rex, looked like are now shifting from reptile-like to bird-like.
We can’t extract DNA from collagen, at least not Dino DNA. That’s because DNA breaks down too fast and dinosaurs are too old. Paleontologists have long debated this. A string of studies in the past decade have pointed to the potential widespread presence of either feathers or fuzz-like proto-feathers in dinosaur species. In 2012, paleontologists found that a T. rex relative, Yutyrannus huali, had filamentous feathers. If a relative had feathers, why not the king of reptiles itself? That’s the scientific definition. Let me try to break it down for you (no pun intended) in simple words. Dino bones look like bird bones. Just by simply looking at the bones we have today you can easily see that they look more like birds than any other animal. This, is actually, the first thing that led researchers to come to believe that dinosaurs were closely related to birds.
Chance of an answer: “We don’t know the logistics,” says Carrano. “We can theorize; these are pretty big animals—seven-ton animals that stood on two legs.” Scientists might look to giraffes or elephants, but they obviously aren’t perfect models. Video: Meet the Robinsons/Disney But wait. There’s more. Horner as revealed that he has already found the gene that ‘turns on’ teeth. Scientists don’t know if T. rex was totally warm blooded or cold blooded, but they think that the giant’s metabolic rate was probably somewhere in between that of crocodiles and birds. A study published last year in PLOS One suggests that cold blooded energetics could not have fueled dinosaurs’ active lifestyles, and thus they probably didn’t regulate their body temperature exclusively by moving into the sun, as modern lizards and crocodiles are known do. If the PLOS One study is true, it is even more likely that newborns had feathers. As far as current theories go, the idea that T. rex’s forelimbs are in fact totally useless is growing in popularity, says Sara Burch, a paleontologist at Ohio University. But Burch isn’t convinced and is trying to reconstruct the muscle layout of T. rex’s forelimbs based on the forelimb muscles of its modern relatives and the shape of the bones.
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