Much fossil craziness has puzzled me over the years, so I hope you can guess how I feel about this article from NatGeo WRT a T.Rex fossil rated at 70 million years old and still with soft tissues prominent:
Soft-tissue dinosaur remains, first reported last year in a discovery that shocked the paleontological community, may not be all that rare, experts say.
A 2005 paper in the journal Science described what appeared to be flexible blood vessels, cells, and collagen-like bone matrix from fossils of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.
Mary Schweitzer, the North Carolina State University paleontologist who announced the finding, said her team has now repeated that feat with more than a dozen other dinosaur specimens.
To make sense of the surprising discovery, scientists are beginning to rethink a long-standing model of how the fossilization process works.
So... it seems like NCSU are going to be among the prominent ground-breakers with better-arranged fossilisation theories — and, who knows? Maybe eventually the first RexBurger (or RexNuggets) available only in huge or truly gigantic sizes? Yeah, well... sorry, but unlike my bizarre self, how many actual real-live great science-fiction authors have managed to utterly avoid tripping over jokes like that?
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There are also fossils of many other T-Rex-like dinos around — many of whom were faster, larger and/or had other unsettling improvements — which kind of give us the hint that having a 20m end-to-end, tall, flash-fast, sharp-toothed, hyperactive and bipedal crocodilish-lookin’-thing blundering hungrily around may not be such a clever achievement after all...
Or perhaps just picture a 40m-stretch heavily enfanged and shockingly-fast snake fossicking around your doorstep, or imagine a massive pet lizard-like predator that can run faster than your car can drive, or a scorpion you could saddle and gallop (briefly), or just repaint some other of our ancient history; but live, hungry and in your face now...