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T. Rex “soft tissue” find
shows fossils aren’t just bone
Posted March 24 2005
Courtesy American Association for the Advancement of Science
and World Science Staff
A newly found Tyrannosaurus rex fossil shows fossils can be more than just
bone. The fossil appears to contain elastic “soft
tissues,” blood vessels and cells, researchers report in tomorrow’s issue of the research journal
Science.
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Researchers say this is a T. rex blood vessel fragment showing detail of
its branching pattern and structures consistent with cell nuclei (arrows) in
the vessel wall. (Image © Science)
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Tissues other than bone can be preserved in the fossil record, but it’s usually difficult to determine their original form and composition in fossils more than a few million years old, the researchers said.
These findings show that soft tissues can be clearly preserved for much longer,
they added, since this specimen is roughly 70 million years old.
North Carolina State University’s Mary Higby Schweitzer and colleagues wrote in the study that they noticed unusual tissue fragments lining the marrow cavity of the
femur, a leg bone.
When they dissolved the mineral deposits in the tissues, the authors said, they were left with a flexible, stretchy material threaded with what looked like blood vessels. The treatment also released some thin, transparent soft tissue vessels that floated in the solution.
These vessels resemble vessels from modern-day ostrich bone, the authors said. Both the dinosaur and ostrich vessels also contained small, reddish brown dots that might be nuclei of the cells that line blood
vessels, called endothelial cells.
Certain portions of the T. rex bone also contained fiber-like structures that looked virtually identical to bone cells, called “osteocytes,” seen among collagen fibers in the ostrich bone, the researchers added.
“The exquisite preservation of this tissue, which does not challenge the timing of dinosaur evolution, may open up avenues for studying dinosaur physiology and perhaps some aspects of their biochemistry,”
said an announcement from the journal, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This will be true “especially if researchers can identify soft tissues in other fossils as well,”
it added.
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Front image courtesy Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S.
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