[Dinosaurs] Scientists find 115-million-year-old red blood cells in a Brazilian dinosaur

[ZeroDay]

A dinosaur from Brazil has given up a remarkable secret. ScienceDaily reports that scientists have found mineralised red blood cells containing preserved heme, a part of haemoglobin, in the leg bones of Aratasaurus museunacionali, a meat eating dinosaur that lived about 115 million years ago

The team was led by Professor Kliti Grice of Curtin University, working with Japan's JAMSTEC, Brazil's National Museum, the Regional University of Cariri and Johns Hopkins. The study is published in PNAS

It is described as the first definitive chemical confirmation of haemoglobin derived molecules inside fossil dinosaur red blood cells. The team also found amino acids linked to collagen

A mineral called hausmannite may have stabilised the cells after the animal was rapidly buried in sediment with little oxygen. Grice said detecting intact heme derived molecules in 115 million year old red blood cells is astonishing

These are preserved structures and molecules rather than liquid blood, and they come from a single dinosaur, so there is no Jurassic Park scenario here. Even so, chemical traces like this could tell us a lot about dinosaur biology. It is also a nice win for Brazil's National Museum, which lost much of its collection in a fire in 2018

What could scientists learn from dinosaur blood chemistry? And does this make you more excited about fossil research?

Scientists just found dinosaur blood that survived 115 million yearswww.sciencedaily.com