> Yeah, if there is soft tissue, it sure ain’t 65 million years old.
I’ve seen the process. They take the fossils and soak them in acid until the minerals all get dissolved away. They then neutralize and wash the acids away. What is left is the collagen and other soft tissue. If they took it one step further and dried it and ground it up, they’d have something like gelatin. This works for any fossil, no matter how old.
The
original paper in Nature Communications is open access, meaning everyone can read it and look at the evidence. The press release from
Imperial College London is cautious:
“
potentially be red blood cells although the researchers
caution that further evidence would be needed to
confirm that the structures do not have another origin.” Maidment says, “Our study is helping us to see that
preserved soft tissue may be more widespread in dinosaur fossils
than we originally thought,” since their discoveries were made in “scrappy, poorly preserved fossils” instead of exceptionally-preserved ones. This suggests that a treasure trove of additional soft tissues are waiting to be uncovered. Mary Schweitzer, who made a splash with her soft tissue discovery in a
T. rex a decade ago, calls it: “an
exciting paper, particularly in showing
what happens when you really look at ancient bone and are
not bound by the expectation that ‘nothing could possibly persist’.
If you don’t look, you won’t find. But if you do, you never know.” (
BBC)