
110M-year-old dinosaur discovered with skin and soft tissue - vwcx
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/06/dinosaur-nodosaur-fossil-discovery/
======
michaelgreshko
Hey, I'm the journalist who wrote the story. A few things: \- The organic-rich
film preserving the outlines of scales (so, yes, _fossilized_ skin) is only a
few millimeters thick. So Mitchell had to prepare the fossil extremely slowly
in order to follow the film through the matrix. \- The half-life of DNA is
~521 years at 13.1°C, as found in this 2012 paper:
[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724)
The team's model predicts higher half-lifes at truly freezing temperatures,
but even at the extreme end, there's no way DNA would survive 110 million
years. \- The dating on the site is well constrained to ~110 million years
old. The fossil was found in the Wabiskaw Member of the Clearwater Formation,
a well-dated rock formation in Alberta. The underlying oil sands have been
radiometrically dated to 112±5.3 million years old.
([http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293))

~~~
amelius
How much does the DNA degrade (i.e., what does half life mean)? Would it be
possible to align any preserved short sequences back together?

~~~
erik-g
How would you know where to align the sequences? I am not an evolutionary
biologist so maybe one of those people have a "yes, actually!", but consider
modern descendants of dinosaurs have 1 billion base pairs and 20,000-23,000
genes[1], and the fact that we have many many living versions of those fowl to
experiment with. Trying to realign chopped up bits of dna with who know how
much completely missing, and minimal opportunities to experiment or direct
information as to how any particular sequence functions, I can't see any way
to extract useful data from highly degraded dna.

More information of degraded dna handling techniques, albeit in the forensics
field and aimed toward people, but interesting to me nonetheless [2]

[1] -
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7018/full/nature0...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7018/full/nature03154.html)

[2] -
[http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...](http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1118&context=theses)

~~~
devoply
Hello? Frog DNA. Duh! :)

~~~
yellowapple
Just keep a tight grip on lysine and everything will work out :)

------
blakesterz
_" For more than 7,000 hours over the past five years, Mitchell has slowly
exposed the fossil’s skin and bone. The painstaking process is like freeing
compressed talcum powder from concrete. “You almost have to fight for every
millimeter,” he says."_

Wow! I had no idea this took so long.

~~~
maxxxxx
Archaeologists are heroes. They spend years painstakingly restoring things.
Many of the digs also take many years of tedious work.

~~~
arca_vorago
I just wish they got more recognition for their work. They do hard things over
long periods of time and barely get a headline... which is good that their
finds aren't oversensationalized, but, I think they themselves need more
direct acknowledgement.

~~~
Aron
Alternatively, we could figure out how to automate his job away.

~~~
maxxxxx
That's exactly the point. If you can figure out how to automate the job come
back with a solution. But until then give them respect. They do difficult that
can't be automated so far.

~~~
eru
Depends. We already automated big parts of the job that we could.

To give a stupid example I came up with in five seconds: nobody needs to draw
pictures of finds anymore, we can just use cameras.

~~~
yellowapple
I met a guy who used to work for the forest service around where I live. His
job was to head to surveyed forestry sites (i.e. potential future logging
camps and what not) and draw pictures of all the archaeological artifacts. He
was eventually replaced by a camera.

------
mrb
Back in 2005, researchers found soft tissues in a T-rex fossil (hollow blood
vessels retaining their original flexibility, elasticity, and resilience):
[http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/~natsirt/stuff/Schweitzer%20S...](http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/~natsirt/stuff/Schweitzer%20Science%202005.pdf)
IIRC they were cutting the large fossil to transport it, and it is while
cutting it that they unexpectedly stumbled upon these soft tissues inside.
This discovery was so mind-boggling at the time.

What research has been conducted on this specific 2005 T-rex specimen? The
scientific community seemed ecstatic after finding it, but I do not remember
any significant discovery made from the tissue.

------
Declanomous
>Researchers suspect it initially fossilized whole, but when it was found in
2011, only the front half, from the snout to the hips, was intact enough to
recover.

Is this because of something that happened a long time ago, or because the
mining machine ate the back end of the dinosaur? The article doesn't really
make it clear.

------
redthrowaway
Could anyone explain why being submerged in water would lead to particularly
good fossilization? I would have thought it would do the exact opposite.

~~~
lbolla
Because underwater there is less oxygen, less light and nice fine muddy
floors.

------
WalterBright
It's only a matter of time until we stumble on an alien spacecraft buried in
the rock.

------
philliphaydon
Such an awesome article and photos, I want to see more photos!!!

But damn, reading the comments from creationists hurts :(

------
mrfusion
I was hoping there might be feathers preserved. Or is that not expected for
this species?

~~~
michaelgreshko
Personally, I've not seen any evidence that ankylosaurs (including nodosaurs)
had feathers. But who knows?

------
perseusprime11
Can we use some of the skin and soft tissue to recreate the dinosaur using
CRISPR?

~~~
giarc
I believe the issue is that DNAs half life is short (521 years in bone[1]) so
after 110 million years, the DNA is pretty degraded.

1\. [http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32799/title/Half-Life-of-DNA-Revealed/)

~~~
perseusprime11
Is it possible to use deep learning to fill out the missing parts? I am
guessing that DNA is like code with a set of instructions encoded.

~~~
objclxt
> Is it possible to use deep learning to fill out the missing parts?

The _half life_ is 521 years - there is nothing left to fill in. If you read
the linked article you'll see even under perfect conditions all DNA is
destroyed after about 6 million years. This fossil is 110 million years old.

------
kyberias
Title needs correction: With FOSSILIZED skin and soft tissue.

~~~
jacquesm
Isn't that kind of obvious given that it is 110M years old or did you
interpret this as potential dino-burger material?

~~~
alayne
Well, the headline says "intact".

~~~
dang
Ok, we've de-intacted the title above.

~~~
jacquesm
Disagree.

Intact for a 110M year old fossil means just that, it does not mean that the
tissue has not been fossilized, it means it has not decomposed as it normally
would.

If soft tissue and skin follow their normal path all you'd have is bones.
Intact here means that the material is still present, but in fossilized form
(just like fossilized bones are no longer the same as real bones).

The 'intact' is very much important here because that means it is not just
fragments.

~~~
kyberias
But clearly many here understood it so that there is literally intact skin and
tissues that could be used to extract DNA. So the word "intact" was
misleading.

~~~
jacquesm
The context is archeology, not grocery shopping.

~~~
kyberias
No, the context is _paleontology_. But I get your point. We disagree and I
accept that.

------
Communitivity
Am I the only one getting Jurassic Park potential vibes off of this? The
potential genetic information from this find is amazing.

~~~
pmoriarty
Does any DNA survive that long? I thought I'd read somewhere that it gets
destroyed relatively quickly.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Half life of 521 years.

~~~
mbreese
At least add a link...

[http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-
life-1.11...](http://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555)

From this article, it would appear that DNA would probably be unreadable at
around the 1.5M year mark, well short of the 110M years that would be required
to recover DNA from this dinosaur.

------
ge96
My god look at the 'armor' on that thing. Humans are weak! But we can also
build bazookas. Thank you asteroid, I would not be here today moving electrons
to this server.

edit: does rapid-under sea burial mean it drowned? haha

