PALAEONTOLOGISTS have extracted blood vessels from the femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex that died 68 million years ago. They have also found tiny structures that look like remnants of cells found on the walls of blood vessels.
The 107-centimetre femur came from a skeleton found in 2000 by a member of Jack Horner鈥檚 team at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. The bone was intact, and its hollow interior had not been filled with minerals while underground. Horner sent samples of the bone to Mary Schweitzer, now at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Schweitzer鈥檚 team dissolved pieces of the bone in a solution that breaks down the bone鈥檚 calcium compounds. They were left with 鈥渁 flexible vascular tissue that demonstrated great elasticity and resilience鈥� (Science, vol 307, p 1952). Further demineralisation freed up transparent, flexible, hollow blood vessels containing small round structures that resembled the nuclei of endothelial cells. Using an electron microscope the researchers compared these vessels with ones extracted from ostrich bones using a similar procedure: they found that the features on the external surface of the dinosaur鈥檚 vessels were virtually indistinguishable from those on ostrich vessels.
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Angela Milner of the Natural History Museum in London says that the work 鈥渟uggests that biological and biochemical information might be recoverable from a wide range of fossil material鈥�.
