Palaeontology

Blood cells discovered in dinosaur fossils

By T.K. Randall
June 11, 2015 ·  14 comments

Soft tissues have been found preserved in prehistoric fossils. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 David Monniaux Scientists at Imperial College in London made the discovery quite by accident when they conducted an analysis of some otherwise unremarkable fossils found 100 years ago in Canada.

Despite being in pieces and of such a low quality that it wasn't even possible to determine which species of dinosaur they belonged to, the fossils were surprisingly found to contain traces of red blood cells and collagen fibers dating back more than 75 million years.

"It's really difficult to get curators to allow you to snap bits off their fossils," said paeolontogist Susannah Maidment who co-authored the study. "The ones we tested are crap, very fragmentary, and they are not the sorts of fossils you'd expect to have soft tissue."Not only does the discovery provide a way for scientists to learn more about these prehistoric reptiles but it also suggests that large numbers of fossils currently being kept in museums and universities around the world may have also retained soft tissue that nobody had realized was there.

"It may well be that this type of tissue is preserved far more commonly than we thought. It might even be the norm," said Maidment. "This is just the first step in this research."

While it's unlikely that these soft tissues will enable scientists to recover actual DNA from a dinosaur fossil the team has admitted that the possibility can't be completely ruled out.

"It's possible you could find fragments, but to find more than that? Who knows?" said Maidment.

Source: The Guardian | Comments (14)

Tags: Dinosaur, Fossil