Jul 31, 2008 15:33
Remember when scientists announced three years ago that they had found the soft tissue of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a 70-million-year-old fossil Never mind. New evidence suggests those findings, which startled the public and the scientific community alike, might be bogus. Researchers led by Thomas Kaye, a paleontologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, report in PLoS ONE that slimy bacterial colonies called biofilms mimic the fleshy residues allegedly recovered from a fossilized bone unearthed in Montana in 2005. These bacterial films may have faked out researchers by growing into the channels and spaces where the T. Rex's blood vessels and bone cells osteocytes had once been, mirroring both the shape and elasticity of this vanished soft tissue. The new study argues that the suspected dinosaur flesh is more similar to biofilms than to present-day collagen, the connective tissue protein supposedly harvested from the ancient dinosaur thigh bone. More
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