A meat eating dinosaur that died in Brazil 115 million years ago left its blood behind inside its own leg bones, and scientists have now proven the blood was really there.
The study, published Monday in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” comes from an international team led by Kliti Grice of Curtin University in Perth, Australia. They studied the leg bones of Aratasaurus museunacionali, a bipedal meat eater about 10 feet long and a distant relative of T. rex. Inside the channels that once carried its blood vessels sat microscopic structures shaped like red blood cells.
Shape alone would never have settled it, so the team ran chemical tests and found heme, the iron carrying molecule in hemoglobin that gives blood its red color, inside the cells themselves. The rock surrounding the fossil had no heme in it, which points to the bone as the source.
“We have not found a vial of dinosaur blood. What we are seeing is a mineral and molecular echo of ancient biology, and that is scientifically much more interesting.”
Kliti Grice, lead author, to Reuters
The preservation sounds impossible until the burial explains it. The animal, about four years old when it died, was buried fast in ground with very little oxygen, and a manganese mineral called hausmannite helped shield the cells as they fossilized. The bones came out of a gypsum mine in Ceará, in northeastern Brazil, back in 2008.
Nobody is cloning anything. The team found no dinosaur DNA, and without it there is no “Jurassic Park” scenario here. Still, Edinburgh paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who was not part of the study, let himself dream for a second: “If it is red blood cells today, might it be fragments of DNA tomorrow? One can dream.”
Featured image: life restoration of Aratasaurus museunacionali by Maurilio Oliveira via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.