115 million years later, a dinosaur’s blood is still sitting inside its bones.
The owner is Aratasaurus museunacionali, a theropod pulled from a gypsum quarry in Brazil back in 2008.
A Curtin University-led team cut into its leg bones and found fossilized red blood cells packed in the canals where vessels once ran. Then came the real shock. Heme, the molecule that carries oxygen, was still there.
Quick burial and a mineral called hausmannite sealed everything like a time capsule. The study just landed in PNAS.
Nobody’s cloning a T. rex. But fossils clearly remember a lot more than we gave them credit for.
