Dinosaur Blood?!

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Transcript:

This is dinosaur blood. And I mean it. It's actual dinosaur blood that paleontologists just found. So, I know in the past couple years there's been some news about fossilized blood vessels, collagen, things like that. But paleontologists were just examining fossil material from Aratasaurus and found weird ellipsoidal structures inside the vascular canals of the hind limb bones. Yeah, these structures could be a handful of different things, including contaminants. So, as researchers usually do, they dug deeper. first uncovering heem B and then other hem related chemical signatures indicating that these structures that looked a whole lot like red blood cells used to contain hemoglobin. They were perfectly preserved red blood cells. Now that obviously doesn't mean that they're intact functioning blood cells or even true hemoglobin. This isn't Jurassic Park and this material is over 100 million years old. But by identifying these tiny structures as red blood cells and detecting chemical traces of what used to be blood, these researchers have actually managed to push back the real physical fossil record of blood itself. It's also going to give researchers great new insights into how these animals actually worked. It's like, yeah, we can assume things about their blood, but evidence always beats assumptions. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.

Kliti Grice et al. 2026. Heme signatures in mineralized red blood cells within vascular canals of a 115-million-year-old dinosaur bone. PNAS 123 (46): e2614248123; doi: 10.1073/pnas.2614248123

Did paleontologists just discover actual dinosaur blood? 🦖🩸 It sure looks like it! While analyzing material from Aratasaurus museunacionali, paleontologists uncovered structures, confirmed by chemical analysis to be fossilized red blood cells!

Episode 367

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