Obligatory Dino Post

You've likely already heard about this, but I think that this is a blog that's supposed to have a predominant paleo component, so I'll put in my two cents. The extraction of intact t-rex soft tissues was reported in the March 25 issue of Science magazine, a scientific journal so sensationalist that they stopped calling themselves a journal, must the way National Geographic did. Anyway, it still counts as primary literature. The actual first report of tyrrannosaur soft tissue was in a 1997 Eath magazine article titled "the real jurassic park." It was a report by these same researchers, headed by Mary Schwitzer that they had found "blood cell like" structures in thin sections of the bone from T-rex. Immediately, young earth creationists jumped on the find and argued that since organic matter breaks down over millions of years, that the intact structure was definately the hard evidence that they needed for recent creation. I anticipate that the creationists will pick up on this soon enough. Answers in Genesis hasn't put anything up on their website, but then they're usually pretty good about rapidly misinterpreting paleontology, so I'll give them a few days to work on it. I was impressed though that Boing-Boing picked up on it so quickly.
Anyway, I first heard about their isolation of fibres and possible blood vessels back in the fall at the meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. From what I've seen, they're research is legit and they do have the remnants of actual tissues. Mind you, very little can actually be learned from this. Nobody every doubted that dinosaur bones contained blood vesels or collogen fibres. Don't expect them to be able to pull meaningful protein sequences out of this stuff either and you can forget about DNA. This has really been an excersize in "is it possible" science. Of course they had to use T. rex, not some hadrosaur from the same formation in the same state of preservation, that's about 1000 times more common. If you want to get your article in the news, use T. rex.