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Dinosaur Blood And Collagen Discovered In Fossils- Here Comes Jurassic Park!
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Scientists at the Imperial College in London have found red blood cells and collagen fibres in the fossilised remains of dinosaurs that lived in Canada 75 million years ago.
The find could mean that dinosaur fossils in museums around the world may also contain soft tissues, possibly even DNA, which would allow scientists a chance at better understanding the evolution and physiology of dinosaurs.
Theguardian.com reports:
Most of the fossils the scientists studied were mere fragments and in very poor condition. They included a claw from a meat-eating therapod, perhaps a gorgosaurus, some limb and ankle bones from a duck-billed dinosaur, and a toe bone from triceratops-like animal.
Intact soft tissue has been spotted in dinosaur fossils before, most famously by Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University, who in 2005 found flexible, transparent collagen in the fossilised leg of a Tyrannosaurus rex specimen.
What makes the latest discovery so remarkable is that the blood cells and collagen were found in specimens that the researchers themselves describe as “crap”. If soft tissue can survive in these fossils, then museum collections of more impressive remains could harbour troves of soft dinosaur tissue. Those could help unravel mysteries of dinosaur physiology and behaviour that have been impossible to crack with bony remains alone.
“It’s really difficult to get curators to allow you to snap bits off their fossils. The ones we tested are crap, very fragmentary, and they are not the sorts of fossils you’d expect to have soft tissue,” said Susannah Maidment, a paleontologist at Imperial.
The fossils are a smattering of pieces collected last century, probably directly from the ground, at the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada. To analyse the remains, the scientists broke tiny pieces off the fragments to expose fresh, uncontaminated surfaces inside.
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2015/06/dinosaur-blood-and-collagen-discovered-in-fossils-here-comes-jurassic-park/
