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Dinosaur soft tissue find questioned
Soft tissue taken from preserved dinosaur bones may not be dinosaur protein at all, but bacteria, paleontologists said on Tuesday.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:02 July 31, 2008
Washington: Soft tissue taken from preserved dinosaur bones may not be dinosaur protein at all, but bacteria, paleontologists said on Tuesday.
Dinosaur experts made headlines around the world when they found what appeared to be soft tissue in a broken Tyrannosaurus rex thighbone.
Last April, a team at Harvard University in Massachusetts said they had analysed a small amount of protein from the sample and had shown it had characteristics of living birds and, more distantly, alligators. But paleontologist Thomas Kaye of the University of Washington in Seattle challenges this idea and says he has seen similar structures and shown them to be bacteria.
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