![]() This newest paper, conducted with weathered, run-of-the-mill fossils rather than pristine ones, suggests that this process might be the rule, not the exception. It's still unclear exactly how this soft tissue is able to survive, but some hypothesize that iron molecules might bind to proteins in the tissue, making it more stable. rex bones do indeed contain blood cells, and Schweitzer has since found soft tissue preserved inside an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur. More recent chemical analysis has provided further evidence that the But her claim remained controversial among paleontologists - even after her 2006 paper, which presented more thorough testing. rex bone slices and observed that there were red blood cells inside it. Schweitzer did so after a veterinarian at a conference happened to see microscope slides of T. rex fossil by Schweitzer appeared to contain blood cells. "We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid." "No right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens," paleontologist Thomas Holtz told Smithsonian for a 2006 story on Schweitzer's discovery. What's more, looking inside them to confirm this would require that people damage the fossil, either by breaking it open or by dissolving the hard, mineralized outside, as Schweitzer did with her T. It was assumed that the proteins and other molecules they're made of would deteriorate in just a few million years. How paleontologists found blood inside dinosaur fossilsįor hundreds of years, most paleontologists never considered that their fossils might preserve these sorts of microscopic soft-tissue features. If they have preserved soft tissue inside them, it could be a sign that thousands of other fossils in museum collections do too. Susannah Maidment, one of the paleontologists who worked on the paper, called them "crap" specimens. rex fossils.īut what's so exciting about this new study is that the fossils used, unlike Schweitzer's, aren't particularly well-preserved. ![]() The idea that dinosaur fossils might harbor soft tissue first surfaced about a decade ago, when paleontologist Mary Schweitzer found evidence of blood cells preserved inside T. Tests showed that they have a similar chemical composition to the blood of an emu (a bird thought to be a relatively close relative to dinosaurs). In other dinosaur fossils, the researchers found features that resemble red blood cells. ![]() How do you smuggle a dinosaur? And 7 other questions about the fossil black market Related This paleontologist just snuck a marriage proposal into his paper on a new dinosaur When researchers scraped tiny pieces off the fossil and looked at them under an electron microscope, they found tiny structures that look a lot like collagen fibers present in our own ligaments, tendons, and bones. The photo above, from a new study published today in Nature Communications and led by Sergio Bertazzo of Imperial College London, shows an extremely zoomed-in view of a 75-million-year-old theropod claw, taken from the London Natural History Museum's collection. The sort of biological tissue now being found in some fossils could tell us about dinosaur anatomy, behavior, and evolution in ways that weren't possible just a few years ago. The fossilization process leaves the overall shape of a dinosaur's bones intact, but all the microscopic structures inside them - the blood cells, connective fibers, and other sorts of soft tissue - inevitably decay over time.īut that view is changing - and it's possible that many ancient fossils may preserve more detail than meets the eye. Dinosaur fossils, it was long thought, are simple objects. ![]()
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