A team of scientists from Imperial College London (UK) has detected what appear to be soft tissue remains in a group of fragments of fossils (in poor condition) of dinosaurs from 75 million years ago . The study on these fossils that belong to the Sternberg and Cutler collections of the Natural History Museums has been published in the journal Nature Communications .
The discovery of remains of red blood cells and collagen fibers in these fossils is a novelty since, until now, only soft tissue had been found in fossils that were very well preserved, which makes the scientific community think about the biology of dinosaurs and their relationships between different species. The way of preserving dinosaur fossils has to be rethought .
To carry out their study, the scientists used a wide range of techniques , including using a scanning electron microscope device to observe the structure, composition and location of soft tissue within part of a fossilized dinosaur claw. After this, an ion beam focused on laminating the samples to observe the internal structure of the fossils resulted in the identification of small structures that bear similarities to red blood cells and fibrous bands of collagen. If so, if it is confirmed that they are dinosaur cells, we could find out at what point these passed to a warm-blooded metabolism like that of birds.
“Our study is helping us see that soft tissue preservation in dinosaur fossils may be much more common than previously thought,” explains Susannah Maidment, a co-author of the study.
