Monday, April 16, 2007

A few million years ago

A few million years ago, the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the earth striking terror into the hearts of all in its path. This thing was one nasty, flesh eating machine.

Contrary to what the movies had us believe, try as they may, they never were able to extract dinosaur-DNA from those pesky little bugs in that pretty yellow glass and science marched on.

Now science has discovered they could map the protean from within dinosaur bones and they tore into their new task with glee. At last, they could find out exactly who or what prowls the earth today carrying the same protean as T-Rex.

So, without further fanfare, here is the closest relative to T-Rex, a CHICKEN!

Yes, you heard right, a chicken, think about that the next time you tear into that drumstick.

In an article on Yahoo News, it was reported that, “In studies reported in the journal Science, Asara and colleagues conclude that seven traces of proteins detected in purified T-rex bone most closely match those reported in chickens, followed by frogs and newts.”

Even more fitting was where they extracted the samples from was bone lining preserved inside a dinosaur drumstick.

I can hardly wait for the next big movie to come out of Hollywood about the chickens who became self aware from genes lying dormant within them, realizing they were a Tyrannosaurus rex, running through the farm striking terror to all within the pecking path.

Yes, we will see movies, books; perhaps a cartoon or two and the world will never be the same. We can also expect the beautiful people of Hollywood to become involved, saying with the recent release of information on chickens, they now consider them to be meat, not fowl, therefore, no one cat eat one again, or an egg, for that matter.

We can all fully expect that chickens will never be the same again.

5 comments:

  1. I saw this article; it's a fantastic discovery. It's also not surprising.

    T. rex is thought to lie very close to the ancestors of birds in a phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs, so I would have been surprised if the protiens were not similar to a modern bird's.

    It will be interesting if they can repeat this procedure using some other dinosaur genera, such as Velociraptor or Avimimus, which are thought to be even closer to the earliest birds.

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  2. I agree, I think it would be a very interesting study.

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