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T. Rex Protein Shows Bird-Dinosaur Link

By Melissa Markham on April 28, 2008 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was not a big dinosaur fan as a child. I learned about them in school, but I was not that interested in learning extra about them, playing with dino models or pretending to be a dinosaur. Their names were long and annoying. They had lived a long, long, long time ago and well...I was more interested in current day things...like would Shaun Cassidy be coming in concert to Roanoke anytime soon.

Jurassic Park changed that a bit for me. When Dr. Grant and the others first see the dinosaurs while the majestic music played in the background. I was there with them. Hook, line and sinker. I could imagine what it would be like to see these animals first hand. Animals that no longer waled the earth. And it made me a little more interested in dinosaurs, and I couldn't help but notice that there seemed to be more dinosaurs than I remembered studying in school. (I definitely don't remember mention of velociraptors.

What really floored me was when Dr. Grant explained his theory that dinosaurs were really related to birds. I thought 'huh?'. I got the cloning of the dinos from the dino DNA, but dinosaurs related to birds? I had never heard such a thing.

Then I had Jack and Katrina. They have both had some interest in dinosaurs. And since we homeschool, I learned a bit more about them and continued to be amazed at the seemingly ever growing variety of them. And the bird-dino connection was mentioned in more and more of the literature that we read. It is amazing to think that some of the largest animals to ever walk the earth are related to animals, which for the most part, we consider to be some of the most fragile.

Now scientists have been able to take T. rex proteins, which were extracted from soft tissues preserved inside 68-million-year-old fossil remains, and compare these proteins to modern birds and reptiles. It turns out that chickens and ostriches are more closely related to the T-rex than any reptiles. Their research also shows a relationship between Mastodons and elephants.

Fascinating!