Scientists Extract Dino Blood from Ancient Bones

Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and colleagues apparently have never watched Jurassic Park. Why else would she extract dino "blood" from ancient bones?

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

... Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.

This can't possibly end well: Link


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This is amazing. Incredible that those tissues could survive for so many eons...! They not only get more insight into evolution of the animals, but also into the development actual fabric of living animals- Have those tissues really always been the same, or has that changed too? And if it hasn't changed very much over all those millions of years, it must in some sence be amazingly perfect. How come? What is so special that that structure survived so unchanged for all that time? And if you see how those tissues are composed, they should also tell about the levels of oxigen in the air, about the general compositiion of the atmosphere at that time.

Exiting- They truly could make a quantum-leap in gaining knowledge of that period in planetary history.
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