News:2009 soft tissue discoveries

In 2009, proteins were discovered in the soft tissue remains of the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis. The preserved proteins date back to the Late Cretaceous, approximately 80 million years ago. The discovery was led by paleontology researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and North Carolina State University (NCSU).

The fossil femur of Brachylophosaurus, upon which the paper is based, was unearthed by Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer in the summer of 2007 in the Judith River Formation in eastern Montana. The sandstone that the femur was encased in seemed to have protected the fossil from completely degrading over time.

Laboratory tests confirmed that the bone fragments showed marked preservation of original tissues and molecules, with microstructures resembling soft, transparent vessels, cells and fibrous matrix, and proteins. A total of eight collagen peptides and 149 amino acids from four different samples, sequences that held up when multiple validation steps were performed, including comparisons with synthetic peptides using a spectral comparison algorithm and statistical evaluation.

In April 2007, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer, PhD, published two papers in Science describing a discovery that collagen extracted from bone fragments of a 68-million-year-old T. rex closely matched the amino acid sequences of modern day chickens.