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Buried for hundreds of years, ancient brains are finally speaking. What they’re saying could change everything we thought we knew. A pioneering scientific breakthrough has made it possible to extract proteins from preserved soft tissues, including human brains, revealing a vast archive of biological information that has long remained inaccessible. This new method promises to reshape our understanding of evolution, diet, microbiomes, and even the development of brain cells over millennia. Tapping Into Hidden Biological Archives Every organism is built from proteins—molecules that drive vital processes such as heartbeats and neural communication. When an organism dies, these proteins usually degrade...

Reconstruction of the Jehol Biota and the well-preserved specimen of Caudipteryx.A team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) has isolated exquisitely preserved cartilage cells in a 125-million-year-old dinosaur from Northeast China that contain nuclei with remnants of organic molecules and chromatin. The study was published in Communications Biology on Sept. 24.The dinosaur, called Caudipteryx, was a small peacock-sized omnivore with long tail feathers. It roamed the shores of the shallow lakes of the Jehol Biota in Liaoning province during...

A Caudipteryx zoui fossil cast. (Daderot/Wikimedia Commons/CC0 1.0) The remnants of DNA may lurk in 125 million-year-old dinosaur fossils found in China. If the microscopic structures are indeed DNA, they would be the oldest recorded preservation of chromosome material in a vertebrate fossil. DNA is coiled inside chromosomes within a cell's nucleus. Researchers have reported possible cell nucleus structures in fossils of plants and algae dating back millions of years. Scientists have even suggested that a set of microfossils from 540 million years ago might hold preserved nuclei. These claims are often controversial, because it can be hard to distinguish...

Close up of the hip bone of an Edmontosaurus. Credit: University of Liverpool Liverpool researchers’ discovery of collagen in fossilized bones could provide new insights into dinosaurs. For years, scientists widely believed that the fossilization process destroyed all original organic molecules, leaving fossils devoid of their original biological material. However, a groundbreaking study led by the University of Liverpool has provided strong evidence that Mesozoic fossils, including dinosaur bones and teeth, still contain preserved organic materials. Using advanced mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques, researchers detected remnants of collagen in the hip bone of an Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed dinosaur. This...

Showdown: Is Dino Soft Tissue Just Bacteria? June 18, 2019 | David F. Coppedge By dismissing dinosaur soft tissue as bacteria, Field Museum scientists may have given creationists a selling point. Scientists at Chicago’s prestigious Field Museum of Paleontology have made a frontal assault on claims of original dinosaur proteins in dinosaur bones. The claims, made primarily by Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University, and by others, have invigorated young-earth creationists with alleged proof that the bones are only thousands of years old, not tens of millions. Are they wrong? Were they looking at bacterial biofilms masquerading as dinosaur...

Twenty years ago Mary Schweitzer found herself the closest that anyone has ever been to a living dinosaur. As she examined a thin slice of a T. Rex bone fragment under a microscope, she realized she was looking at what appeared to be preserved red blood cells- cells which had no place in a 65 million year old fossil. It was the first time that anyone had found evidence that biological material could survive the passage of millions of years and still retain its molecular structure, challenging one of the central beliefs of paleontologists. Proving that what she was seeing...

The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 10-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week’s issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed. “It’s encouraging,” especially because...

Abstract Exceptionally preserved organic remains are known throughout the vertebrate fossil record, and recently, evidence has emerged that such soft tissue might contain original components. We examined samples from eight Cretaceous dinosaur bones using nano-analytical techniques; the bones are not exceptionally preserved and show no external indication of soft tissue. In one sample, we observe structures consistent with endogenous collagen fibre remains displaying ~67 nm banding, indicating the possible preservation of the original quaternary structure. Using ToF-SIMS, we identify amino-acid fragments typical of collagen fibrils. Furthermore, we observe structures consistent with putative erythrocyte remains that exhibit mass spectra similar to emu...

Dinosaur fossils, it was long thought, are simple objects. The fossilization process leaves the overall shape of a dinosaur's bones intact, but all the microscopic structures inside them — the blood cells, connective fibers, and other sorts of soft tissue — inevitably decay over time. The photo above, from a new study published today in Nature Communications and led by Sergio Bertazzo of Imperial College London, shows an extremely zoomed-in view of a 75-million-year-old theropod claw, taken from the London Natural History Museum's collection. When researchers scraped tiny pieces off the fossil and looked at them under an electron microscope,...

Scientists have extracted intact bone marrow from the fossilized remains of 10-million-year-old frogs and salamanders. The finding, detailed in the August issue of the journal Geology, is the first case of fossilized bone marrow ever to be discovered and only the second report of fossilized soft tissue. In June of 2005, scientists announced they had found preserved red blood cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone. "It pushes back the boundary for how far [soft tissue] fossilization can go," said study leader Maria McNamara of University College Dublin in Ireland. Why it matters Preserved soft tissue could provide insight into...

Alive as dinosaurs may seem to children, knowledge of them as living creatures is limited almost entirely to what can be learned from bones that have long since turned to stony fossils. Their soft tissues, when rarely recovered, have lost their original revealing form. A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex recently discovered in Montana, scientists reported today, has apparently yielded the improbable: soft tissues, including blood vessels and possibly cells, that "retain some of their original flexibility, elasticity and resilience." In a paper being published on Friday in the journal Science, the discovery team said that the remarkable preservation of the tissue...

His jaw must have dropped when he examined the material before him. It was a rare find. So rare, in fact, that, if what he was looking at was really what he thought it could be, it would be the first and only evidence of soft body tissue from an early hominin ever discovered.......soft tissue from an early (possible) pre-human ancestor nearly 2 million years old. The find was part of the remains uncovered by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand and his colleagues when they discovered fossils of Australopithecus sediba, a possible precursor to our earliest...

The Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, which opened its doors earlier this year, boasts this country’s second-largest set of displayed dinosaur remains. The record is still held by the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. Both are located in Montana near a rich cache of world-famous fossils. The Glendive Museum stands apart, however, in that it presents dinosaurs as having been drowned and their remains preserved in the massive worldwide flood described in the Bible. This view has prompted reactionary comments from mainstream scientists ...

For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex. If scientists can isolate proteins from the material, they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, said lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

Three years ago, a team of scientists rocked the paleontology world by reporting that they'd recovered flexible tissue resembling blood vessels from a 68-million-year-old dinosaur fossil... Subsequent analyses by many of the same scientists -- including Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh -- indicated that the fossil contained small bits of collagen, a fiber-forming protein that's the largest non-mineral component of bone... Schweitzer and her colleagues, of course, take issue with the new findings. "There really isn't a lot new here, although I really welcome that someone is attempting to look at and repeat...

Amazing find of dinosaur 'mummy' Scientists now think these dinosaurs were more muscular than previously thought Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of a dinosaur that has much of its soft tissue still intact. Skin, muscle, tendons and other tissue that rarely survive fossilisation have all been preserved in the specimen unearthed in North Dakota, US. The 67 million-year-old dinosaur is one of the duck-billed hadrosaur group. The preservation allowed scientists to estimate that it was more muscular than thought, perhaps giving it the ability to outrun predators like T. rex. The researchers propose that the dinosaur's rump was 25%...

Deep inside the single leg bone of an 80-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur, scientists have found a hoard of proteins and blood cells providing the first clear biochemical evidence that dinosaurs are indeed the ancestors of modern birds - linked by evolution. Until now those links had been based mainly on physical evidence - on feathers from dinosaur fossils, on their fossil eggs, on their fossilized birdlike nestlings and on the close resemblance of dinosaurs and birds like the famed "flying dinosaur" called archaeopteryx. Now the same team of scientists, which found similar biological material in a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex two years...

Although creation-based organizations have reported for over a decade on the technical scientific journal articles published about soft tissue found inside dinosaur remains, mainstream media outlets have largely been silent on the subject. But a recent segment that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes finally broke the news to a broader audience. The soft tissue issue may be gaining more traction, and even “may be changing the whole dino ballgame,” according to correspondent Lesley Stahl.[1] The program is currently viewable online at the CBS website. In a field test demonstration to determine whether a dinosaur fossil was real bone, and not...

Fossil Strengthens Dinosaur-Bird Link Feb. 14 — A 130 million-year-old newly discovered fossil of a small meat-eating dinosaur found in China is further proof of the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, scientists say. "This animal is not a direct ancestor to birds but it is a very close cousin. It is from a group called troodontids which is closely related to birds," Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum in Chicago said on Wednesday. The new dinosaur, called Sinovenator changii, was probably feathered and is almost the same age as the oldest known bird Archaeopteryx. "The similarities in the skeleton ...

Scientists Broom Challenging Discoveries Beneath 'Contamination' Rug by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Recent years have witnessed many revolutionary discoveries of original tissues in fossils. Each new find challenges the widely held notion that fossils formed millions of years ago. After all, lab tests repeatedly show proteins and other biological materials lasting no longer than hundreds of thousands of years—millions are out of the question. As a result, these fossils clearly look like recent deposits. What tactics do evolutionists use to accommodate these original organic remains into their entrenched belief in deep time? One tactic is to simply turn a blind...