T-Rex collagen discovered

The 68-million-year old T-Rex fossil

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Friday, 13, Apr 2007 12:42

Scientists have uncovered collagen from a 68-million-year old Tyrannosaurus Rex (T-Rex) bone.

Such a discovery may change the way people think about fossil preservation, the researchers write in today's edition of the journal Science.

Current theories about how fossils occur hold that original protein fragments in soft tissue cannot survive as long as the rest of the bone.

Dr Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University discovered soft tissue in the leg bone of a T-Rex recovered in 2003 from the Hell Creek in Montana.

After conducting a chemical and molecular analysis of the bone, she concluded that original protein fragments including collagen might be preserved.

She then turned to Dr John Asara, director of the mass spectrometry core facility at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and Dr Lewis Cantley, instructor in pathology at Harvard Medical School, to see if they could confirm her findings.

"We looked for collagen because it's plentiful, it's durable, and it has been recovered from other fossil materials, although none as old as this T-Rex," Dr Schweitzer said.

"It's also a relatively easy molecule to identify, and it's not something that any microbes living in the immediate environment could produce. So identifying collagen in the soft tissue would indicate that it is original to the T-Rex – that the tissue contains remnants of the molecules produced by the dinosaur, though highly altered."

Work by the three scientists concluded that it was collagen from the T-Rex.

Commenting on the importance of the discovery, Dr Schweitzer said: "This data will help us learn more about dinosaurs' evolutionary relationships, about how preservation happens, and about how molecules degrade over time, which could also have some important medical implications for treating disease."