Tyrannosaurus rex known as MOR 555, or "Big Mike," a replica of which is shown here, is one of several dinosaurs whose bones have yielded organic matter.
Image: Photograph by David Liittschwager
In Brief
- The conventional view of fossilization holds that over time all of the organic compounds disappear, leaving behind only inert, mineralized remains.
- But a growing body of evidence indicates that under certain conditions organic substances, such as remains of blood, bone cells and claws, may persist in fossils for millions of years.
- These ancient substances could help answer such questions as how dinosaurs adapted to changing environmental conditions and how quickly they evolved.
More In This Article
Peering through the microscope at the thin slice of fossilized bone, I stared in disbelief at the small red spheres a colleague had just pointed out to me. The tiny structures lay in a blood vessel channel that wound through the pale yellow hard tissue. Each had a dark center resembling a cell nucleus. In fact, the spheres looked just like the blood cells in reptiles, birds and all other vertebrates alive today except mammals, whose circulating blood cells lack a nucleus. They couldn’t be cells, I told myself. The bone slice was from a dinosaur that a team from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., had recently uncovered—a Tyrannosaurus rex that died some 67 million years ago—and everyone knew organic material was far too delicate to persist for such a vast stretch of time.
For more than 300 years paleontologists have operated under the assumption that the information contained in fossilized bones lies strictly in the size and shape of the bones themselves. The conventional wisdom holds that when an animal dies under conditions suitable for fossilization, inert minerals from the surrounding environment eventually replace all of the organic molecules—such as those that make up cells, tissues, pigments and proteins—leaving behind bones composed entirely of mineral. As I sat in the museum that afternoon in 1992, staring at the crimson structures in the dinosaur bone, I was actually looking at a sign that this bedrock tenet of paleontology might not always be true—though at the time, I was mostly puzzled. Given that dinosaurs were nonmammalian vertebrates, they would have had nucleated blood cells, and the red items certainly looked the part, but so, too, they could have arisen from some geologic process unfamiliar to me.
This article was originally published with the title Blood from Stone.
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8 Comments
Add CommentDear Miss Schweitzer,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisit was very interesting to know about your success in proving the existence of organic matter in fossils. i think it is a big leap towards our ability to one day be able to isolate the dinosaur DNA in the lab and decode it. I have one question about the article, the red blood cells found in the blood vessels of the fossil bone which you are calling as LLRT(LITTLE ROUND RED THINGS), shouldn't it be abbreviated as LRRT.
Regards
arshidpandit
new mexico.usa
And then, you can recreate dinosaurs on a remote island of Costa Rica, and...oh wait...didn't you know you can already get dinosaur DNA from insects in amber?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Prof. Schweitzer,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExcellent work. Mass spectrometry is an appropriate and powerful tool to sequence protein fragments. Your antibody work shows that relatively short sequences of protein are present and recognizable. Could the same thing be done with and nucleic acid remnants? Despite the well known potential source of dinosaur DNA from insects in fossilized amber (where you don't know which dinosaur the DNA comes from), the possibility of extracting DNA from fossil bones tells you the exact species that it comes form. It is much more difficult to be sure that DNA is not contaminated by post bacterial growth than protein, but the nature of the DNA should be quite telling. Your putative red blood cells have a nucleus. There is DNA in there!
I'm sure the image of resurrecting a dinosaur is in the back of many peoples' minds as they read the article. Has there been enough material recovered in the organic matter to sequence a complete genome?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I was at school one of the other kids was getting small slices of fossils and putting them on slides to put in a projector. One could see round objects which were obviously plant cells. I thought, if things can be preserved at that level, why not at a smaller scale? We learn in physics that an object keeps its speed and direction until another force acts on it. Does not this apply on the molecular scale? Surely there would be a nook in some fossil somewhere where chemical or biochemical forces have been prevented from operating on what is there. I have never been convinced that it is impossible, just highly improbable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the last paragraph of Ms. Schweitzer’s complete article not seen above she asks several questions including: “Why are these materials preserved when all our models say they should be degraded?" She could have answered that question by a simple $600 experiment by testing for C-14 in one of 10 Accelerated Mass Spectrometer (AMS) laboratories in the USA . The half life for the radioactive decay of C-14 is 5,730 years and AMS equipment can detect each atom of C-14 with reasonable accuracy to about eight half-lives or about 50,000 years.
Since 1990 there has been a steady stream of reports of finding C-14 in dinosaur bones and other “ancient” fossils with a definitive report being published in a book written in 2009 entitled, “Evolutionism: The decline of an hypothesis.” C-14 dates of 23,170 ±170 to 30,890 ± 200 years were reported for dinosaur bone collagen in the paper entitled: “Recent C-14 Dating of Fossils Including Dinosaur Bone Collagen. It would certainly appear that the results are actually a confirmation of rapid formation of the geologic column as modern sedimentology studies have predicted.
Dr. Schweitzer and Dr. Jack Horner (who is mentioned in the full article as being the curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana and one of the world’s foremost dinosaur authorities) are top in their fields, but when are they and others going to repeat these simple experiments on their dinosaur bones? One is left to wonder if they are not committed to an agenda which would prevent them from doing this.
James B. Phillips
On 8/11/2011 I sent an email to Ms. Schweitzer asking her to respond to my previous comment here. As of yet I have received no response from her. I am not surprised at this because if scientists such as Ms. Schweitzer adamantly refuse to conduct simple C-14 tests on these dinosaur bones to determine their true age one may well wonder if we are not dealing with some sort of scientific malfeasance by omission.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf the public realized the great reliability of C-14 testing and that such testing consistently shows that the dinosaurs lived thousands, not millions of years ago, the frogs to princes fairy tale evolution myth would take a most serious blow.
A very revealing commentary by Dr. Robert Sungenis on this article where it can be viewed in its entirety is seen at http://catholicintl.com/index.php/component/content/article/58-evolution/348-evolution-falsified-once-again.
James B. Phillips
Dear Mr. Phillips,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am curious if you have received a response from Ms. Schweitzer as of yet. I too would be curious of the C-14 radioisotope dating of the fossils found with red blood cells and soft tissue. I fear that fear of upsetting the "religion" of evolution is what prohibits a lot of science from probing deeper and getting at the heart of the matter.
However, I am glad to see that many Ph.D.-level scientists are not afraid of letting science explain the natural history for itself, such as those who have signed a document "Dissent from Darwinism." I truly hope that Ms. Schweitzer is not letting the fear of the possibility that what humans know about science is just a blip on the map of what is truly going on around us.
Please keep me updated James if there is any comment from Ms. Schweitzer, nearly a year after first trying to contact her.
Christopher B. Jeffreys