Putting Flesh on Bone

More dinosaur bones yield traces of blood, soft tissue

Scientists studying dinosaur evolution are finding many more bones to pick.
Researchers from London have found hints of blood and fibrous tissue in a hodgepodge of 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones. These fossils had been poorly preserved. That now suggests residues of soft tissues may be more common in dino bones than scientists had thought. Details appeared June 9 in Nature Communications.

Scientists are excited at the idea that soft tissues might still exist in most dinosaur bones. It would give them the ability to study these long-extinct animals at the cellular level. And such studies could reveal when dinosaurs switched from being cold-blooded to warm-blooded creatures.

Matthew Collins is an expert in the study of ancient proteins at the University of York in England. (Proteins form the basis of living cells, muscle and tissues. They also do the work inside of cells.) Until now, scientists had thought that traces of soft tissue from dinosaurs remained only in really well-preserved fossils. “It’s exciting to think that we may have more soft tissue in dinosaur bones kicking around,” says Collins, who was not involved in the new study.

Susannah Maidment is a paleontologist at Imperial College London in England. She was part of a team that has just found residues of soft tissue in slivers of eight dinosaur bones. These included a toe claw from a theropod. There also was a rib from a duckbilled dinosaur. All had been found about a century ago, mostly in Alberta, Canada. Since then, the bones had been stashed in drawers at the Natural History Museum in London.

The team used a scanning electron microscope to study the bones. This special microscope can highlight features that are just a few billionths of a meter across. The dinosaur bone images revealed what appeared to be red blood cells. A second type of powerful microscope probed the structure of some bone features. These images showed bands similar to patterns formed by collagen in animal bones today. Collagen is a fibrous protein. It is found not only in bones, but also in cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues.


More on this story here

Bones and Tensegrity

Tensegrity is a 60's term coined by Buckminster Fuller that inspired Kenneth Snelson to make monumental artworks with cable and tubing, but the principles are building blocks for more than just pop sculpture. When applied to bones, some interesting origins of tendons and locomotion can be inferred. This is especially interesting to me when looking at naked bones of dinosaurs. Which bone is connected to which other bone? What did they look like with tendons holding muscle to bone? How did they get around? How did their skin stretch?

Check out some cool bone tensegrity models here and here.

Private ownership of fossils? Yay or nay?

Dinosaurs for sale: How fossil business impacts science

Commercial sellers offer scientists access to unique specimens, but at a cost

In 2009, commercial fossil hunters in Montana excavated what was, unbeknownst to them, the jaws of an important new species of dinosaur.

Scientists weren't informed, and the fossil was sold to a private collector.

Fortunately, the story doesn't end there, as it sometimes does.

'It's wrong for people to assume they can get something for free.'- Peter Larson, Black Hills Institute of Geological Research

In the fall of 2010, the private collector heard that paleontologist David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto would be visiting his town of Fort Peck, Mont. He wanted to know more about the fossil he had purchased, so he showed it to Evans.

"I was blown away," Evans recalled. "I instantly knew it was a new species of raptor."

"It was a unique find that is scientifically very important," added Evans, who co-authored a paper describing the new raptor in 2013.

The jaws turned out to belong to the only raptor from its time period ever found in North America. The turkey-sized meat-eater named Acheroraptor temertyorum would help paint a more vivid picture of the diverse ecosystem where Tyrannosaurus rex stalked Triceratops 66 million years ago.

Acheroraptor also revealed a surprise — it was a close relative of dinosaurs in Asia, suggesting that dinosaurs were migrating between continents.

But no one knew any of that until Evans, the  ROM's curator of vertebrate paleontology and an associate professor at the University of Toronto, talked the collector into selling his treasure to the ROM. It became part of the ROM's collection in 2011. The museum doesn't disclose the prices it pays in order to minimize their effect on the market, but Evans said it was reasonable and affordable.

Bringing the fossil into a museum was the only way it could be studied and be recognized as a new species with its own scientific name. That's because science needs to be repeatable by other scientists, Evans said, and that's possible only when they have unrestricted public access through an institution such as a museum.

"If we had not bought it," he added, "it would have continued to be in the hands of a private collector and off-limits to science."
Acheroraptor illustration

The story of Acheroraptor illustrates how buying fossils from commercial collectors can provide scientists and the public with access to extraordinary dinosaur specimens they couldn't otherwise study. But it also shows how easily the commercial trade can inadvertently keep important specimens out of scientists' reach.

That is, the bustling dinosaur business has a profound influence on the science of paleontology – something that paleontologists struggle with.

Canadian museums often buy dinosaur fossils

Dinosaurs are a huge public draw, but for many Canadian museums, buying dinosaurs is the only way to get them.

Laws enacted since the late 1970s in the main provinces where dinosaur fossils are found — Alberta and Saskatchewan — specify that dinosaur fossils are owned by the Crown. Regulations effectively ban them from being removed from the province.
Acheroraptor

If the Royal Ontario Museum had not bought the Acheroraptor fossil, it would have remained off-limits to science, says curator and paleontologist David Evans. (Royal Ontario Museum)

Paleontologists say the laws do a good job of safeguarding fossils for science. But they mean museums like the ROM, located in Ontario where no dinosaur fossils have been found, can't grow its collection except by buying fossils from outside Canada, mainly from the U.S.

"Every major museum in Canada buys fossils and it's been a common practice for a century," Evans said.

That said, museums far prefer to collect fossils themselves than buy them — partly because many have trouble affording them, and partly because commercial specimens are often missing important scientific data about their origins.

Fossil From Dinosaur Era Reveals Big Mammal With Super Senses

Dinosaurs that roamed Madagascar more than 66 million years ago had a most unusual fuzzy mammal living in their shadows—one so large, and with such strange features, that scientists say they could have never predicted its existence.
 
That is, until 2010, when a team of scientists looking for fish fossils accidentally collected its nearly complete skull from a site along Madagascar's west coast.

Since then, researchers have learned that the groundhog-like critter had supersensory capabilities, with a large portion of its brain devoted to smell, and that it weighed about 20 pounds (9 kilograms)—much more than most mammals alive during the age of the dinosaurs.

"Not only does it have bizarre features, it's bizarre in being so humongous," says vertebrate paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University, in New York, who reports the find Wednesday in the journal Nature. Krause compares the critter's appearance to nutria, which are semiaquatic rodents, or an overgrown groundhog. "It's Punxsutawney Phil on steroids," he jokes.

What's more, the lucky find is helping paleontologists fill in the mammalian evolutionary tree, especially during the age of the dinosaurs.

Link to full article

Monday's daily dose of bones is anthropological

Check out this series of absolutely amazing animated x-rays

See all the X-rays here