Almost 70 million years after the
Tyrannosaurus rex strode the earth, a arguing over whether the modern
chicken is the fearful dinosaur's descendant is rampaging through the
scientific populace.
In a letter to the journal
Science
published on Thursday,
University of California, San Diego, scientists attacked methods put-upon by a
Harvard University-led team that proposed the T rex-chicken connexion in April 2007.
The Harvard team responded in a letter to the same journal, saying their
psychoanalysis of the dinosaur's protein is sound.
The original Harvard
study base suspected T rex protein fragments appeared to mate a common
protein, called collagen, in chickens, encouraging a long-suspected link betwixt
birds and dinosaurs. Critics of the study say the findings may be random, and
there isn't enough information about other species' proteins to say whether the
match with chickens is definitive.
"The statistical signification is unvoiced
to judge without a lot of additional information," said Michael Hofreiter, an
evolutionary scientist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, in a
telephone interview on Friday.
"Personally, I doubt that the link is
real." The Harvard study's findings have preoccupied scientists world Health Organization study
ancient tissue and molecules believed to have been preserved for thousands to
millions of eld, said Hofreiter, who isn't part of either team. Without more than
data on other species'' proteins it's not possible to suppose whether the match with
chickens is better than it mightiness be with reptiles, he said.
Harvard
approached the trouble like a boy wHO finds that his monkey's random typewriting
matches some words in a dictionary, researchers light-emitting diode by Pavel Pevzner, music director
of the center for algorithmic and systems biology at the University of
California, San Diego, said in a sting letter in the Science
journal.
"The boy is so surprised that he writes a paper called
�My monkey can spell out!' the UCSD researchers wrote in their letter. "Some
scientists are not convinced."
The Harvard team sooner came under
fire in September when Enrico Cappellini, an archeologist who studies ancient
proteins at the University of York in the U.K., suggested they had unmarked
other possible interpretations of their data. Cappellini's letter of the alphabet also was
published in
Science
, just weeks after
the Harvard researchers had volunteered a correction of some of their
ferment.
"I'm not surprised that other people have set up issues in these
results," Cappellini aforementioned Thursday in a telephony interview.
John
Asara, a Harvard pathologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston
who lED the 2007 dinosaur study, said that while his group's methods are
unconventional, they are scientifically valid. Collagen is one of the few
proteins that has been well studied in many species, and is highly similar from
one to the adjacent, he said.
Subsequent studies have too shown strong
matches between T male monarch protein and ostrich collagen, he said.
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