You know how in Jurassic Park the crazy scientists create dinosaurs from DNA they distilled from a fossil trapped in amber?Well, that was fun and totally impossible because no dinosaur fossils had ever been found with their DNA intact.  That is, until March 15, 2016.  Coincidentally, March 15th is also the Ides of March.  Now, with the possible exception of the song Vehicle recorded by the band Ides of March, almost nothing good is ever associated with that date.  In fact, March 15th is historically recognized for the anniversary of bad things. Like the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.   In the Roman Calendar the Ides occurred near the midpoint of the month which made it on the 13th for most months, but on the 15th of March, May, July, and October. The Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon, reflecting the lunar origin of the Roman calendar. On the earliest calendar, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.

The Ides of each month was sacred to Jupiter, the Romans’ supreme deity. The Flamen Dialis, Jupiter’s high priest, led the “Ides sheep” (ovis Idulius) in procession along the Via Sacra to thearx, where it was sacrificed.  In addition to the monthly sacrifice, the Ides of March was also the occasion of the Feast of Anna Perenna, a goddess of the year (Latin annus) whose festival originally concluded the ceremonies of the new year. The day was enthusiastically celebrated among the common people with picnics, drinking, and revelry.^[5] One source from late antiquity also places the Mamuralia on the Ides of March.^[6] This observance, which has aspects of scapegoat or ancient Greek pharmakos ritual, involved beating an old man dressed in animal skins and perhaps driving him from the city. The ritual may have been a new year festival representing the expulsion of the old year.

I suppose a modern version might be created where we dress up Jim Peterik (the founder, primary songwriter and creative force of the band Ides of March) in goatskins and beat on him with sticks until he leaves the City of Chicago.  But then what will will do about the band Styx or Peterik’s other band, Survivor?  Okay, let’s forget that.

But it does seem a bit ominous that the remains of a dinosaur that may contain the holy grail of all dinosaur fossils – DNA – was announced on March 15th.  “Yes, it’s possible,” Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News, referring to genetic material that may be present in this as well as similar dinosaur finds. “We have some evidence that fragments of DNA may be preserved in dinosaur fossils, but this remains to be tested further.”

SEE ALSO: New dino reveals how T. rex became top predator

Yeah, that’s what they said in the movie as well, right before they built the park.  What has been confirmed so far is that the T. rex, which was found in Montana and dates to 68 million years ago, retained medullary bone that reveals the individual was pregnant. Medullary bone is only present in female living dinosaurs, i.e. birds, just before and during egg laying. It’s this type of bone that could retain preserved DNA.  Ms. Zanno is an assistant research professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University, where she is also head of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ Paleontology Research Lab and is curator of paleontology.  She explained that medullary bone lines the marrow cavity of the long bones of birds.

“It’s a special tissue that is built up as easily mobilized calcium storage just before egg laying,” she said. “The outcome is that birds do not have to pull calcium from the main part of their bones in order to shell eggs, weakening their bones the way crocodiles do.”

Crocodiles, she said, are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs. “Medullary bone is thus present just before and during egg laying, but is entirely gone after the female has finished laying eggs,” she said.  Early on, Mary Schweitzer suspected that medullary bone was present in the tyrannosaur remains, and was able to confirm her suspicions after she, Zanno and their team conducted a chemical analysis of the T. rex’s femur.

The material, found to be consistent with known medullary tissues from ostriches and chickens, contained keratan sulfate, a substance not present in any other bone types.

“This analysis allows us to determine the gender of this fossil, and gives us a window into the evolution of egg-laying in modern birds,” Schweitzer said.

Zanno explains we now know extinct dinosaurs inherited egg laying from their ancestors, just as birds inherited this reproductive strategy from their dino ancestors. “The discovery of medullary bone is just one more piece of evidence that blurs the line between birds and other theropod (carnivorous two-legged) dinosaurs like T. rex,” she said.

The research is published in Nature Scientific Reports.  In a prior study, Sarah Werning of the University of California and Berkeley and her colleagues found medullary bone in the carnivorous dinosaur Allosaurus as well as in the plant-eating dino Tenontosaurus. The discoveries happened somewhat by chance, as she and the other researchers were studying dinosaur growth rates when they realized three of the dinosaurs were pregnant females.

She said, “We were lucky to find these female fossils. Medullary bone is only around for three to four weeks in females who are reproductively mature, so you’d have to cut up a lot of dinosaur bones to have a good chance of finding this.”

SEE ALSO: 80-million-year-old dinosaur blood vessels never fossilized

Schweitzer agrees and said that the femur her team studied was already broken when she received it. Echoing Werning, she acknowledged that most paleontologists would not want to cut open, or demineralize, their fossils in order to search for the rare medullary bone.  Nevertheless, because much of the pregnant T. rex’s skeleton was found, including her skull, there is a very good chance that the paleontologists will soon be able to provide a detailed description of her overall anatomy and general appearance. They already know that the dinosaur mom-to-be was 16-20 years old when she died of as of yet unknown causes.

Okay, so far so good.  These ladies seem nice enough that they wouldn’t want to build an amusement park full of live dinosaurs just to rake in some big dough before the creatures eat everyone.  The only way to be sure, however, is to keep an eye on the new summer activities as they are announced in the newspaper…just in case.

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