Dinosaurs and chickens look to be linked.

• Position: Fossils - Brief article

In a venture once thought to lie outside the reach of science, researchers have captured and sequenced tiny pieces of collagen protein from a 68,000,000-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. The seven protein fragments appear to match most closely amino acid sequences found in collagen of present-day chickens, lending support to a recent and somewhat controversial proposal that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related.

"Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that's all based on the architecture of the bones," notes John Asara, an instructor in pathology at Harvard Medical School, Boston. "This allows you to get the chance to say, 'Wait, they really are related because their sequences are related.' We didn't get enough sequences to definitively say that, but what sequences we got support that idea."

In another study, researcher Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University, Raleigh, found that extracts of T. rex bone reacted with antibodies to chicken collagen, further...