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Contributed by Editor One
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Friday, 25 March 2005 |
 Yesterday, a team of researchers announced that they had extracted what appeared to be a 65-million year old dinosaur's soft tissue from within its fossilized bone. Paleontologists had been forced to break the bone to get it aboard a helicopter when leaving the dig site at Montana's Hell's Creek. To their surprise, it yielded more than fossilized bone and fragments. Scientists have analyzed the soft tissue and determined it to contain what appear to be the ancient dinosaur's bone and blood cells.
The 1991 best-selling novel, Jurassic Park, told the story of modern scientists cloning dinosaurs from just such soft-tissue remains. When Michael Crichton wrote the science fiction tale, cloning technology was incapable of creating a copy of even a modern, living reptile. Not a single cell of dinosaur tissue had survived the fossilization process among all the dinosaur remains that had been found. Now cloning has matured to the point of regular use for replication of even complex mammals such as farm animals. With this new discovery of a dinosaur's preserved soft tissue, the pivotal piece of Chrichton's apocryphal tale appears to have come into grasp.
Tyrannosaurus Rex appears to have been a ferocious predator, standing as high as 15 feet tall, equipped with a large brain and a jaw full of teeth that could easily snap a man in two. A key plot line of Crichton's Jurassic Park was that paleontologists had underestimated the fierce intelligence of dinosaurs. With the technology and materials at hand, should we uncover the truth?
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