When paleontologists found the Archaeopteryx they finally had a well-preserved fossil that showed only slight differences between Archaeopteryx and theropods. The ominous roar of a T. rex, made familiar by the Jurassic Park movies, is nothing more than the product of a filmmaker’s creative imagination. Scientists look to modern relatives of the T. rex—birds and reptiles—for indications of what the dinosaurs might have sounded like, if they made any vocalizations at all. In reality, their calls may have been more like a shriek or a grumble than a roar. “We can guess that it might have sounded like a crocodile or an ostrich, but definitely not a lion and therefore no roaring or purring,” says Carrano.

Studying changes in proteins can actually give us more insights about evolution than just looking at the DNA. Proteins can yield clues about the age of a sample or about the environment in which an animal lived or was buried. Schweitzer Collagen is the main component of connective tissue and one of the most abundant proteins in living animals. Once Horner got his T. rex home, Mary H. Schweitzer of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences found some soft-tissue preserved inside the T. rex bone. We have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast. We’re just not going to be able to do what they did in ‘Jurassic Park.’ We’re not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur.” HornerThat’s why this collagen find is so important. We can’t clone a Dino from collagen but we sure can learn a lot. In fact, we can learn more from proteins than we could from DNA anyway. Chance of an answer? It’s looking more and more likely that T. rex had feathers, but coloration and skin texture remain unknown, for now. Dino bones look like bird bones. Just by simply looking at the bones we have today you can easily see that they look more like birds than any other animal. This, is actually, the first thing that led researchers to come to believe that dinosaurs were closely related to birds.

Scientists don’t know if T. rex was totally warm blooded or cold blooded, but they think that the giant’s metabolic rate was probably somewhere in between that of crocodiles and birds. A study published last year in PLOS One suggests that cold blooded energetics could not have fueled dinosaurs’ active lifestyles, and thus they probably didn’t regulate their body temperature exclusively by moving into the sun, as modern lizards and crocodiles are known do. If the PLOS One study is true, it is even more likely that newborns had feathers. But wait. There’s more. Horner as revealed that he has already found the gene that ‘turns on’ teeth. Until a specimen is found with preserved imprints of feathers, though, the jury is out. “We have some opportunity to know if they had feathers because we can find impressions,” says Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the National Museum of Natural History. “But it’s highly unlikely that we will ever know its color or the texture of its skin.” The 2nd evidence is feathers. Over the years you may have noticed that there have been more and more pictures of dinosaurs with feathers. Our traditional ideas about what Velociraptors, or even the T-Rex, looked like are now shifting from reptile-like to bird-like. This is because paleontologists have determined that dinosaurs are more like birds than any other animal.

Ok, so here’s the-big-idea. Collagen is a protein and proteins are important because they tell us a lot about an organism.