Companies like Colossal Biosciences have been flirting with the idea of bringing back extinct animals for years. But now that a team of researchers says they’ve found traces of dinosaur red blood cells that somehow survived 115 million years, we might finally see whether researchers can show a level of restraint that Jurassic Park’s John Hammond clearly didn’t have. Though, we probably won’t have to worry about that kind of problem for a while.
According to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists led by Kliti Grice at Curtin University analyzed a 10-foot, 75-pound juvenile Aratasaurus museunacionali dug up in Brazil. Inside the leg bone’s vascular canals, they found oval structures packed with heme, the iron-filled chemical ring in hemoglobin that moves oxygen around the body.
It’s the first time anyone has identified heme within the structures in a dinosaur fossil.
Researchers Discovered a Surprising Clue About Dinosaur Biology Inside a 115-Million-Year-Old Fossil
Those squishy bits survived for hundreds of millions of years without rotting thanks to the low-oxygen mud that seems to have overtaken the creature soon after its death, quickly halting the decay process. Then, a manganese oxide mineral called hausmannite moved in, acting like all-natural bubblewrap that kept the cellular framework and collagen amino acids in place.
While the imagination immediately turns to Jurassic Park and whether anyone with the power to bring dinosaurs back to life actually paid attention to the moral lessons of the multibillion-dollar film franchise, finding heme isn’t the same as finding intact DNA.
Grice insists they aren’t trying to cook up a live dinosaur; instead, they’ll use this discovery to study the creature’s metabolism, how it transported oxygen throughout its body, and its activity levels. And then there’s the much more interesting question posed by this discovery: the chances might be slight, but if there is one set of dinosaur bones out there with some little specks of blood still kicking around, there might be others just like it sitting in museum collections around the world or in the next batch of bone researchers dig up.
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