Actual red blood cells in fossil bones from a Tyrannosaurus rex? - With traces of the blood protein haemoglobin (which makes blood red and carries oxygen)? - It sounds preposterous — to those who believe that these dinosaur remains are at least 65 million years old
In a recent article,1 scientists from Montana State University, seemingly struggling to allow professional caution to restrain their obvious excitement at the findings, report on the evidence which seems to strongly suggest that traces of real blood from a T. rex have actually been found.
The story starts with a beautifully preserved T. rex skeleton unearthed in the United States in 1990. When the bones were brought to the Montana State University’s lab, it was noticed that ‘some parts deep inside the long bone of the leg had not completely fossilised.’ To find un-fossilised dinosaur bone is already an indication more consistent with a young age for the fossils (see More on fresh dino bone, below).
Let Mary Schweitzer, the scientist most involved with this find, take up the story of when her co-workers took turns looking through a microscope at a thin section of this T. rex bone, complete with blood vessel channels.
‘The lab filled with murmurs of amazement, for I had focused on something inside the vessels that none of us had ever noticed before: tiny round objects, translucent red with a dark centre. Then a colleague took one look at them and shouted, “You’ve got red blood cells. You’ve got red blood cells!”2
Schweitzer confronted her boss, famous palaeontologist ‘Dinosaur’ Jack Horner, with her doubts about how these could really be blood cells. Horner suggested she try to prove they were not red blood cells, and she says,‘So far, we haven’t been able to’.
Looking for dinosaur DNA in such a specimen was obviously tempting. However, fragments of DNA can be found almost everywhere — from fungi, bacteria, human fingerprints — and so it is hard to be sure that one has DNA from the specimen. The Montana team did find, along with DNA from fungi, insects and bacteria, unidentifiable DNA sequences, but could not say that these could not have been jumbled sequences from present-day organisms. However, the same problem would not be there for haemoglobin, the protein which makes blood red and carries oxygen, so they looked for this substance in the fossil bone.
The evidence that haemoglobin has indeed survived in this dinosaur bone (which casts immense doubt upon the ‘millions of years’ idea) is, to date, as follows:
Evidence of haemoglobin, and the still-recognizable shapes of red blood cells, in un-fossilised dinosaur bone is powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago.
Article by Carl Wieland
More on fresh dino bone…
To claim that bone could remain intact for millions of years without being fossilised (mineralised) stretches credibility. The report here of red blood cells in an un-fossilised section of dinosaur bone is not the first time such bone has been found.
Biologist Dr Margaret Helder alerted readers of Creation magazine to documented finds of ‘fresh’, un-fossilised dinosaur bone as far back as 1992.3
1. M. Schweitzer and I. Staedter, The Real Jurassic Park, Earth, pp. 55–57, June 1997.
2. The T. Rex blood cells were actually first noticed by a professional pathologist casually interested in looking at such an ‘old’ piece of bone under the microscope.
3.Creation 14(3):16. The secular sources were Geological Society of America Proceedings abstract. 17:548, also K. Davies in Journal of Palaeontology 61(1):198–200.