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Dinosaur blood vessels found

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    #2
    Linnaeus
    Registered Users Posts: 218 ✭✭Linnaeus


    An incredible discovery; but the article does not explain with enough detail. Original blood vessels? That is doubtful, considering the fossilization process. Perhaps we should rather say, the residual remains or impressions of original blood vessels. A lot more study must be done, on this and other ancient specimens, before we will be able to determine if and how delicate organic material like blood vessels might be preserved over millions of years.


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    #3
    Adam Khor
    Registered Users Posts: 5,279 ✭✭✭Adam Khor


    Organic material does preserve; this is not the first find of this sort. Back in 2006 they found soft matter inside a fossilized T. rex bone (of all creatures!!) which was hypothesized to be actual soft tissue from the animal itself, which had somehow survived the process of fossilization.

    dinosaur-shocker-520-386.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg

    See here:

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur-shocker-115306469/?no-ist

    More recently, it was found that iron in the animal's blood was behind the preservation of the soft-tissues:

    http://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html

    Ever since, more soft tissue has been found inside other T. rex bones as well as bones from at least two kinds of hadrosaur (duckbilled dinosaur). And this is coming from rather poorly preserved fossils, so there may be even more and better material within better fossils (although of course, there's the little problem of finding a way to analyze it without breaking valuable specimens...)


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