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You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Birdzilla!

Birdzilla!

by Tim F|  April 25, 20083:22 am| 46 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology

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When researchers retrieved the thigh bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex from nearly 100 million years under the Montana soil, they probably didn’t have Jurassic Park theme running through their heads. Yet when the bone yielded a small sample of collagen protein, some of the oldest preserved protein ever found, paleontology and biochemistry finally began to merge. The protein yielded a sequence and the sequence settled an evolutionary debate that has roiled anatomists since the 19th century.

We know that dinosaurs’ and birds’ archosaur ancestor split off from the lizards long ago, we have skeletal evidence linking dinosaurs and birds and several transition species have been found that don’t fit neatly into either dinosaur or bird. If that didn’t nail the case, the collagen sequence certainly should.

Protein retrieved from a 68 millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizards’, strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not reptiles, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.

The new work builds on a 2007 analysis showing remarkably close similarities between T. rex collagen and collagen from modern-day chickens, but that work did not include comparisons to other living species. Collagen is the primary protein in bones.

No doubt science will soon tackle the obvious next step – exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour? I can’t imagine any possible downside.

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Reader Interactions

46Comments

  1. 1.

    TenguPhule

    April 25, 2008 at 3:36 am

    No doubt science will soon tackle the obvious next step – exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour? I can’t imagine any possible downside.

    The mass extinction of American couch potatoes?

  2. 2.

    Dumbo

    April 25, 2008 at 4:45 am

    When I saw Jurassic Park, I thought, what idiots these people are. They bring dinosaurs back to life, and they build an amusement park out of it?

    They should have started A FARM! Not T. rex. That would have been difficult to manage. But Triceratops, oh my, what a tasty and cheap burger that would make. Dinosaurs grew at a fantastic rate. Some big herbivorous herding dinosaurs like Triceratops would have made for a livestock boom.

    Although, according to this report, we can guess they probably would have tasted like chicken.

  3. 3.

    Conservatively Liberal

    April 25, 2008 at 4:45 am

    No doubt science will soon tackle the obvious next step – exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour? I can’t imagine any possible downside.

    I couldn’t begin to guess how many, but I can guess where that chicken you describe lived.

    Texas. Everything is bigger in Texas. Hmmm, BBQ T-Rex anyone? ;)

    Interesting stuff though. Except for the ‘fact’ that Jesus rode his pet stegosaurus to market less than 2,000 years ago. Even Mary kept a talking pterodactyl in a cage, sheesh!

    Millions of years ago, what a joke! ;)

  4. 4.

    Nancy Irving

    April 25, 2008 at 4:54 am

    Obviously the ostriches were injecting the dinosaur collagen so their necks wouldn’t be so wrinkled and they wouldn’t have to keep their heads in the sand.

    Next up for IDers: Botox!

  5. 5.

    ked

    April 25, 2008 at 5:07 am

    I can’t help think that dinosaurs’ meat would taste probably very much like chicken. They are related to birds and even more distant relatives like lizards or frogs kinda have a taste similar to chicken (quite different from red meat).

    Kentucky Fried T-REX anyone?

  6. 6.

    Prince Roy

    April 25, 2008 at 5:14 am

    The article is wrong in one respect: birds are not the ‘closest living relatives of dinosaurs’. They are in fact dinosaurs. Therapods, to be more precise. At least this is the opinion of the majority of paleontologists.

  7. 7.

    PaulW

    April 25, 2008 at 6:19 am

    Looks like someone needs a Torg VS. Chicken t-shirt from Sluggy Freelance…

  8. 8.

    RSA

    April 25, 2008 at 6:27 am

    exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour?

    And with its head cut off? The up side is that this will spark new thinking in dinosaur-based horror movies–it keeps coming after you, even after you chop off its head!

  9. 9.

    Krista

    April 25, 2008 at 6:40 am

    Awww…BIRDZILLA gets his (her? its?) very own thread! This is really special. BIRD, whereever you are, come take a bow, you magnificent caps-locked bastard!

  10. 10.

    Ivan Ivanovich Renko

    April 25, 2008 at 6:46 am

    One dozen wings can feed the entire team league… where’s the beer?

  11. 11.

    rachel

    April 25, 2008 at 6:56 am

    …exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour?

    With nasty, big, pointy teeth!

  12. 12.

    4tehlulz

    April 25, 2008 at 7:30 am

    >>…exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour?

    Ostrich + Liger = oh shi-

  13. 13.

    jake

    April 25, 2008 at 7:36 am

    exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour? I can’t imagine any possible downside.

    bUT wiLL iT BE AbLE to TYPE??

  14. 14.

    carpeicthus

    April 25, 2008 at 7:41 am

    In Soviet Triassic, chicken eats you!

  15. 15.

    Dork

    April 25, 2008 at 7:52 am

    This is clearly horrible news for Democrats.

  16. 16.

    TheFountainHead

    April 25, 2008 at 8:15 am

    I, for one, welcome our new feathered, fanged, carnivorous masters.

  17. 17.

    Soylent Green

    April 25, 2008 at 8:17 am

    Dinosaurs grew at a fantastic rate.

    They got big by feasting on a smorgasbord of biomass that was an order of magnitude more abundant than today.

    So if you want to raise triceratops like thanksgiving turkeys, you’ll have to feed them a steady supply of soylent green pellets.

  18. 18.

    tuco

    April 25, 2008 at 8:45 am

    Actually, this has all been thought of before. There was a scifi story published by Isaac Asimov, in which the theme was the farming of dinosaurs for meat: The so called “dino-chicken”.

    Asimov rules

  19. 19.

    Xanthippas

    April 25, 2008 at 9:03 am

    No doubt science will soon tackle the obvious next step – exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour? I can’t imagine any possible downside.

    I imagine that it would, necessarily, be free range.

  20. 20.

    Thomas

    April 25, 2008 at 9:21 am

    And the upside is that the Birdzillae could help us fend off the robot menace!

  21. 21.

    Regular Reader

    April 25, 2008 at 9:22 am

    “When researchers retrieved the thigh bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex from nearly 100 million years under the Montana soil, they probably didn’t have Jurassic Park theme running through their heads”

    Actually, this is slightly embarrassing – they probably did. I went to Montana State with the people who were involved in the excavation of that T Rex. They would bring a portable CD player for background music during long days in the field, and one of their favorite albums was the Jurassic Park soundtrack. Paleontology folk tend to be quite open about their dorkiness.

  22. 22.

    The Moar You Know

    April 25, 2008 at 9:25 am

    If you all want an idea of what T-Rex may have tasted like, go get some ostrich (it’s hard to find but definitely not impossible, especially here in California). It’s damn good. It does not taste very much like chicken – it’s got a unique taste all its own.

  23. 23.

    Notorious P.A.T.

    April 25, 2008 at 9:45 am

    The only question now is: was this false evidence planted by Satan to lead us astray, or by God to test our faith?

  24. 24.

    Z

    April 25, 2008 at 9:47 am

    The last bit of science blogging has been so depressing. Thanks for the paleontology love!

  25. 25.

    ThymeZone

    April 25, 2008 at 9:48 am

    What Krista said.

    Bird is the Word.

  26. 26.

    b. hussein canuckistani

    April 25, 2008 at 9:55 am

    If you all want an idea of what T-Rex may have tasted like, go get some ostrich (it’s hard to find but definitely not impossible, especially here in California). It’s damn good. It does not taste very much like chicken – it’s got a unique taste all its own.

    Emu, on the other hand, is quite nasty. Based on that experience, I’d let someone else eat the first T-burger and see if they ever stop vomitting.

  27. 27.

    Evinfuilt

    April 25, 2008 at 9:57 am

    At long last I post dealing with my previous field (Paleo) and what great insights do I have in store from years of college learning to track dinosaurs and sniff out their coprolite.

    This is cool :)

    *and yes, very non-surprising.

    So who wants to go the creation museum, point at the exhibits and shout “Tastes like chicken!”

  28. 28.

    Catsy

    April 25, 2008 at 9:58 am

    In Soviet Triassic, chicken eats you!

    New keyboard owed.

  29. 29.

    Evinfuilt

    April 25, 2008 at 10:02 am

    Actually, I do have a real comment.

    Triceratops probably won’t be as tasty as we hope. Remember they’re not from the same line that brought us the birds, they went extinct, they didn’t evolve.

    So we need to choose our herbivore dinosaur ranches a bit more carefully.

  30. 30.

    Cain

    April 25, 2008 at 10:03 am

    When I saw Jurassic Park, I thought, what idiots these people are. They bring dinosaurs back to life, and they build an amusement park out of it?

    No way dude. What you really want is to use some of these birds as a replacement for heavy machinary! I also envision replacing the airplane with with one of them flying dinosaurs, pteradactyls.

    Pennsylvania mine workers will be able to check in and check out of work with using a dinosaur to sound off the off-duty sign. Yabba dabba doooooo!

    cain

  31. 31.

    Seitz

    April 25, 2008 at 10:20 am

    exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour? I can’t imagine any possible downside.

    You mean mega ultra chicken? No, shhhh, he is legend.

  32. 32.

    libarbarian

    April 25, 2008 at 10:52 am

    bak bak bikaaak!!!

  33. 33.

    bitter slippy hussein toad

    April 25, 2008 at 11:04 am

    So, Mr. Stein:

    Now that we’ve got even MORE evidence of how dinosaurs evolved into current forms, will you be producing a movie that says these thigh bones don’t exist, or aren’t really as old as radiometric dating says they are?

    Anyone? Anyone?

  34. 34.

    Dakota Pasota

    April 25, 2008 at 11:47 am

    No doubt science will soon tackle the obvious next step – exactly how many genetic changes do we need to get a 50-foot, meat eating chicken that runs 45 miles an hour?

    And from there it’s pretty much a gimme on how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.

  35. 35.

    Cain

    April 25, 2008 at 12:25 pm

    You mean mega ultra chicken? No, shhhh, he is legend.

    What about El Pollo Diablo, the legendary Devil Chicken which haunts Plunder Island?! El Pollo Diablo

    His terrible squawks haunt my dreams still. Sometimes.. when the moon is out I hear a faint Cockle-Doodle-Doo.. Wait, that could be Mark Penn.

    cain

    cain

  36. 36.

    empty

    April 25, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    Pevzner seems to disagree quite strongly:

    Pavel Pevzner, director of the Center for Algorithmic and Systems Biology at the University of California at San Diego, said his own research, soon to be published, refutes Asara’s work. He said he cannot describe details until they are published, but he was blunt in his response to the new study, which appears in today’s issue of the journal Science.

    The findings are “a joke,” Pevzner wrote in an e-mail. “Serious evolutionary biologists will laugh reading this piece.”

    The way these guys sequenced the protein was through mass spectrometry. And the paper seems to indicate that there was considerable amount of noise in the measurements. I am way outside my area of expertise here. Could people who actually understand these things comment on how reliable these conclusions are.

  37. 37.

    jake

    April 25, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    So who wants to go the creation museum, point at the exhibits and shout “Tastes like chicken!”

    I know for a fact that Jesus tastes like wine and crackers.

  38. 38.

    Duros Hussein 62

    April 25, 2008 at 2:30 pm

    No way dude. What you really want is to use some of these birds as a replacement for heavy machinary!

    Meh. It’s been done.

  39. 39.

    Regular Reader

    April 25, 2008 at 2:49 pm

    Could people who actually understand these things comment on how reliable these conclusions are.

    I can probably come close. (Caveat: biochemistry isn’t my speciality either…) It depends on what “conclusions” you’re wondering about. The conclusion that dinosaurs are more closely related to birds than to other “reptiles;” that one’s pretty solid, and has actually been so for a few decades. As for the conclusion that the materials studied here were original biologic material and provided additional evidence showing the above relationship, that’s a bit more uncertain. Later in the article there’s the following comment:

    Eddy Rubin… said he is “pleased to see” that the Harvard group was doing the hard work of duplicating and expanding upon its initial results, which were unusual not only because of the starting material but also because of the team’s reliance on a novel method for analyzing tiny samples.

    The material being studied here and the methods being used are both very new, and previous to the study by the Harvard people, wasn’t being done by people who specialize in biochemistry. So, there’s still plenty of bickering within the paleontology community about the reliability of these particular studies (though Dr. Pevzner sounds a little overconfident), but not about the dino/bird connection.

  40. 40.

    nightjar

    April 25, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    This thread is funny as hell! More, More….

  41. 41.

    Jimmy Higgins

    April 25, 2008 at 5:38 pm

    Forget Asimov. The truly prescient writer on this front was Oliver Butterworth. His 1956 masterpiece “The Enormous Egg” recounts what happens when young Nate Twitchell’s hen lays and hatches out a triceratops egg. As Dumbo suggests out early in the thread, Uncle Beazley, the dinosaur, grows extremely rapidly but mainly eats alfalfa, confounding the blowhard Senator who wants to outlaw him as Un-American and responsible for rising food prices.

  42. 42.

    mmc

    April 25, 2008 at 6:23 pm

    Well now those bones of the 150 foot tall Col. Sanders begin to make sense….

  43. 43.

    maxbaer (not the original)

    April 25, 2008 at 6:54 pm

    I have an entry for thread theme song.

  44. 44.

    stuck in 200

    April 25, 2008 at 7:01 pm

    Who needs TV when we have T. Rex?

  45. 45.

    dbrown

    April 25, 2008 at 7:25 pm

    The bone in question had a clear, tissue-like lining of material at its center that under a microscope, appeared identical to that found in birds (see orginal article). To talk that this material some-how leeched into a fossilized outer wall (i.e. stone)is beyond ridiculous. The material is the real thing – the chemical results are far more iffy but the fossil records requires that birds are dino’s, so the chemical results are consistent.

  46. 46.

    Birdzilla

    September 5, 2008 at 12:57 am

    Saw that one on MONSTER QUEST about the giant birds and this is just what could have lead to the inidian folklore about the THUNERBIRD or even the ROC i mean some belive that mythical creatures could have come from real encounters like the legends of DRAGONS maybe someone encounted a dinosour

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