NEW YORK: A team of scientists at London’s Natural History Museum examined eight fossils from the museum’s collection, and they reached a shocking discovery: The fossils contained evidence of ancient dinosaur red blood cells and proteins.
The findings, described in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that the preservation of soft tissues inside fossils could be more common than was previously believed, Science magazine explains. Scientists have discovered what they believed were cellular tissues inside dinosaur bones in the past, but the previous findings weren’t confirmed. The newly discovered blood is more reliable than past studies, because the scientists used a new method, called a “focused ion beam,” to locate the proteins.
Susannah Maidment, one of the paleontologists behind the study, told Science that finding the soft tissue was “completely unexpected.” Still, some experts who weren’t involved in the research are skeptical about the find, and Maidment’s team hopes to do further research to sequence the amino acids in the protein fragments they discovered. The research could help scientists understand how dinosaur proteins are different from those of modern reptiles.
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