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THE classic movie Jurassic Park was fiction. Cloning live dinosaurs from blood found in a fossilised insect is not on the cards anytime soon. But now we’ve found what appears to be real dinosaur blood inside a bog-standard fossil bone.
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“We stumbled on these things completely by chance,” says , whose team was trying to study bone fossilisation by cutting out tiny fragments of fossils. Instead, they found blood-like cells and collagen from 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossils – 10 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex appeared. Although the cells are unlikely to contain DNA, those extracted from better preserved fossils using the same technique may do so, she says – but there is still no evidence that they do (Nature Communications, ).
This article appeared in print under the headline “There’s blood in those dino bones”
