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| | You may have heard the hypothesis that modern birds are distant relatives of dinosaurs, but the resent study proved it to be more than just hypotheses. Scientifically speaking, a hypothesis is something that is theoretically probable, but not yet supported by the facts and practical studies.
Theory, on the other hand, is a hypothesis supported by hard scientific facts and findings. Such is the case of the recent study of soft bone tissues extracted from a 70 million year old T-Rex found in Montana in 2003, which was a predator.
It was always thought that the soft tissues could not survive the test of time and get disintegrated within millions of years. So the tissues of a dinosaur were thought to never be found in a state suitable for scientific studies. What a surprise it was for the biologists of North Carolina State University when they saw the preserved proteins in the T-rex bones which were in fairly good condition for molecular studies. The team of researchers is led by Mary Higby Schweitzer who was fascinated by the findings, no less than the rest of the scientific community. Fossils like that come once in a century, Schweitzer says.
It basically brought the stereotypes of what was not possible, and showed us that with good enough sediments, there are still dinosaur bones, and other prehistoric animal bones which have soft tissues preserved well enough to be used in studies and can provide solid scientific facts and support one theory or reject another. This is how hypotheses become theories.
Basically the best scientific material in the old fossils that can ever be extracted is the DNA of a species that lived long time ago. However the DNA structure is quite fragile to withstand the destruction of time, weather, climate and chemicals through millions of years. We will probably never be able to find the DNA of dinosaurs, because they have been broken and disintegrated into simpler molecules. Some DNA's may be found in woolly mammoths but we are talking about completely different conditions - ice and snow - almost ideal for preserving DNA.
With dinosaurs we are not that lucky, so to say, - the conditions of their habitats were quite the opposite of optimal - sun, high temperatures and lots of smaller rodent animals who ate the remains of dead bodies and their bones.
That said, the current study made a scientific breakthrough by extracting well preserved proteins from the soft bone tissues of the T-Rex.
Proteins are the next best thing that contains information on encoded genes. Looking at proteins we can say many things about the genes which were in the DNA. The T-rex proteins were shown to be very similar to those of a modern chicken.
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Here's the surprise news - scientists found that dinosaurs are closely related to chickens. They also found that a giant asteroid did not kill dinosaurs. Colonel Sanders did. Some experts say it was wild coyote that chased chickens too much.
