quote:Tyrannosaurus rex, meet the chicken – your third cousin more than 100 million years removed. A new family tree based on protein sequences recovered from dinosaur fossils firms up the dinosaur's avian lineage.
"Palaeontologists have known this overall connection. We have now confirmed it with molecular data," says John Asara, a biochemist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study.
His team compared sequences of a collagen protein recovered from a 68 million-year old T. rex fossil and a half-million year old mastodon (a kind of extinct elephant) with those same sequences from 21 modern animals – including chicken, alligator, elephant and human.
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
So...the greatest financial incentive for using time travel to rob the far past of resources will be to KFC!!!
Posted by DevilDreamt (Member # 10242) on :
I don't care what you say, I still want to eat a dinosaur. Barring time travel or reverse-genetic engineering a chicken into a T. Rex, looks like I'm still going with plan A. Capture the Loch Ness Monster and turn it into delicious Nessie Burger.