Last month, scientists at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, announced a thrilling discovery. The 70-million-year-old fossil of a Tyrannosaurus rex that had been excavated in 2003 contained blood vessels and other soft tissues. Such tissues have never been recovered in a dinosaur bone. The specimen could provide new clues to the biological makeup of the animals.
The fossil was found at Montana's Hell Creek Formation, a remote area that is rich in dinosaur remains. Scientists believe that this T. rex weighed five tons and was 40 feet tall. The thighbone is so big and heavy that field researchers had to break it in half to load it onto a helicopter.
A Very Lucky Break
In the lab, paleontologists noticed unusual tissue fragments lining the
walls of the bone's marrow cavity. Normally, after a few million years,
soft tissues are replaced by mineral deposits. The scientists soaked the
bone in weak acid to remove the minerals. After the minerals dissolved,
a clear stretchy material was left behind. "It was totally shocking,"
said team leader Mary Schweitzer.
A microscope revealed that the tissues contain tiny blood vessels and reddish-brown dots that are thought to be cells' nuclei, or central structures. The T. rex vessels are almost identical to those found in modern ostrich bones. Scientist believe that this could support the theory that birds are living descendants of dinosaurs.
A Real-Life Jurassic Park?
Some researchers hope to recover dinosaur DNA--the chemical that makes
up genes--from the tissues. That notion raised an interesting question
for dinosaur fans: If DNA is recovered, could it be used to clone
dinosaurs, as scientists did in the film Jurassic Park?
"There's no Jurassic Park scenario," cautions Hans-Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "But there's lots of biological information locked in this material."