The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #79614   Message #1444247
Posted By: Alice
26-Mar-05 - 02:53 PM
Thread Name: BS: Tyrannosaurus Rex Burgers?
Subject: RE: BS: Tyrannosaurus Rex Burgers?
The lead paleontologist, Jack Horner, is based in my home town at The Museum of the Rockies. Click here The dino that made the news was found in Montana. Horner says this is just the beginning of checking for soft tissue in dino bones.

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http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/510685/
B. rex was one of 31 dinosaurs found over four years in the Hell Creek Formation around Jordan and the Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana. All located on U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service property, they were discovered during a major effort to reconstruct the dinosaur-dominant ecosystem that existed there 65 million years ago. Bob Harmon, chief preparator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, found B. rex after hiking into a steep box canyon.

"I was out looking for dinosaurs and actually stopped to eat lunch along side a big 50-foot cliff and just turned around and looked behind, and one of the foot bones of a T. rex was sticking out of a cliff," Harmon said. "I went up and looked and could see some other bones sticking out."

To study its soft tissue vessels and cellular preservation, Schweitzer removed minerals from the bone and conducted chemical analyses. She dehyrdrated and rehydrated bone tissue. She stretched and restretched blood tissue. She used scanning electron microscopy to compare features of the dinosaur vessels with those found in ostriches. Ostriches are primitive birds known to be related to dinosaurs. She isolated transparent vessels from two other exceptionally well-preserved T. rexes and compared those to the B. rex.

An explanation for B. rex's condition is part of her ongoing research, Schweitzer said. Horner said he didn't think it was preserved any better than any other T. rex in sandstone.

"It's simply the first dinosaur that has been studied in this manner, and therefore the first dinosaur to have yielded this kind of information," Horner said. "I'm sure that many other dinosaurs are going to preserve the same material when people begin looking."
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Alice in Montana