What happens when a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex meets 21st century medical science? A North Carolina State University researcher and her colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found out when they confirmed the existence of protein in soft tissue recovered from the bone of a 68 million-year-old T. rex.

In a venture once thought to lie outside the reach of science, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have captured and sequenced tiny pieces of collagen protein from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. The protein fragments-seven in all-appear to most closely match amino acid sequences found in collagen of present day chickens, lending support to a recent and still controversial proposal that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related.