Latest John Asara Stories

A paleontologist at North Carolina State University says she has discovered new evidence to support the idea that soft tissue and proteins can be preserved over long periods of geological time after a protein sequence was recovered from an 80 million-year-old duck-billed hadrosaur.Dr. Mary Schweitzer, along with colleagues Dr. John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Chris Organ of Harvard Medical School, and a group of researchers from Montana State...

Tyrannosaurus rex just got a firm grip on the animal kingdom's family tree, right next to chickens and ostriches. New analyses of soft tissue from a T.rex leg bone re-confirm that birds are dinosaurs' closest living relatives. "We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds - ostrich and chicken - better than any other organism that we studied," said researcher John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. "We also...

Dinosaurs may have been more closely related to chickens than reptiles, according to a report released on Thursday.Researchers John Asara and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston sought to fill in the gaps of the dinosaurs' family tree.Molecular analysis, or genetic sequencing, of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein from the dinosaur's femur confirms that T. rex shares a common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser...