Al Khudary

By Evan Ratliff

Everyone suspected dinosaurs were giant birds; then one researcher produced 68 million-year-old protein to prove it. Critics rejected those findings as statistical junk. How a femur sparked a new field of biology—and a scientific smackdown.

Sixty-eight million years ago, on a soggy marsh in what is now a desolate stretch of eastern Montana, a Tyrannosaurus rex died. In 2000 a team of paleontologist led by famed dinosaur hunter Jack Horner found it. These are scientific facts, as solid as the chunk of fossilized femur from that same T. rex that Horner gave to North Carolina State University paleontologist Mary Schweitzer in 2003. It was labeled sample MOR 1125.

Several facts concerning MOR 1125 are also beyond dispute: First, that a technician in Schweitzer's lab put a piece of the bone in a demineralizing bath to study its components but left it in longer than necessary; when she returned, all that remained was a pliable, fibrous substance. That Schweitzer, intrigued by this result, ground up and prepared another piece of the bone and sent it to John Asara, a mass spectrometry expert at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. That Asara treated the brown powder with an enzyme and injected it into a mass spectrometer the size of a washing machine, hoping to detect and sequence any T. rex proteins that had miraculously survived inside the bone. And finally, that the device purred and buzzed for an hour before spitting out data describing the molecular contents of the sample.

A tiny bacterium has been coaxed back to life after spending 120,000 years buried three kilometres deep in the Greenland ice sheet.

Researchers who found it say it could resemble microbes that may have evolved in ice on other planets.

Officially named Herminiimonas glaciei, the bug consists of rods just 0.9 micrometres long and 0.4 micrometres in diameter, about 10 to 50 times smaller than the well-known bacterium, Escherichia coli.

"What's unique is that it's so small, and seems to survive on so few nutrients," says Jennifer Loveland-Curtze of Pennsylvania State University, whose team has described the new species.

She speculates that thanks to its tiny dimensions, it can survive in minute veins in the ice, scavenging sparse nutrients that were buried along with the ice. It also has extensive tail-like flagella to help it manoeuvre through the veins to find food.

"Along with the snow, you get dust, bacterial cells, fungal spores, plant spores, minerals and other organic debris," says Loveland-Curtze. "So we postulate that it lives in these microniches in the ice."