{"id":952117,"date":"2026-11-04T09:16:15","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T09:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/952117\/"},"modified":"2026-11-04T09:16:15","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T09:16:15","slug":"shades-of-jurassic-park-after-australian-dinosaur-find-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/952117\/","title":{"rendered":"Shades of Jurassic Park after Australian dinosaur find – News"},"content":{"rendered":"

It may not be Jurassic Park, but a discovery by an Australian-led research team has unearthed the first evidence of dinosaur blood in game-changing discovery.<\/p>\n

Researchers from Perth\u2019s Curtin University collaborated with palaeontology teams from across the globe as part of an Australian government-funded study probing soft tissue preservation in fossils.<\/p>\n

The traces were found in a 115-million year old fossil unearthed in Brazil 18 years ago.<\/p>\n

The Australian study\u2019s lead author Professor Kliti Grice said perhaps the most exciting implication of the find is that museums around the world already hold an enormous, largely untapped scientific resource.<\/p>\n

Many fossils are not spectacular display specimens. Even so, they may preserve remarkable molecular, chemical and environmental information,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The National Museum of Brazil sent aratasaurus bones from an existing collection to Grice more than a year ago.<\/p>\n

The bones were dug up from a mineral-rich area of north-eastern Brazil, where they had been fossilised in the manganese oxide mineral hausmannite.<\/p>\n

The theropod dinosaur\u2019s rapid burial within weeks of its death, paired with the microbially-rich hausmannite, acted as a time capsule to preserve numerous blood cells within vascular canals, Grice said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While previous studies have reported possible red blood cell structures in fossils, this study is the first to chemically prove the presence of haemoglobin-derived molecules inside the cells of any fossilised specimen.<\/p>\n

\"dinosaur\"<\/p>\n

The aratasaurus fossil died 115-million years ago. Photo: Curtin University<\/p>\n

The limb bones were analysed for more than nine months by teams in Perth, Japan, Brazil and the US to chemically prove the presence of haemoglobin-derived molecules inside the cells, as well as amino acids of collagen.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew very early on what I was dealing with without even looking under the microscope. I was pretty excited,\u201d Grice said.<\/p>\n

\u201dTo detect intact heme-derived molecules in 115-million-year-old red blood cells is astonishing: this really is a landmark discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

The findings extend the known fossil record of blood and challenge longstanding assumptions that certain biomolecules such as haemoglobin cannot survive deep time, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much other stuff in (the sample) that is unbelievable, there could be a whole suite of papers following this one,\u201d Grice said.<\/p>\n

Grice believes the revelation opens exciting new avenues for molecular-level palaeontology that could lead to further discoveries about the ancient animals\u2019 blood, metabolism and activity levels.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really pushing the limits back for these molecules in deep time, that these can be preserved and we can try to understand why they\u2019re preserved and how they\u2019re preserved,\u201d she said<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could really unlock information from such specimens \u2026 and start to look at evolutionary pathways.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Grice says fresh discoveries could be waiting in museum drawers. Photo: Curtin University<\/p>\n

The Founding Director of Curtin\u2019s WA-Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre, Prof Grice hopes the discovery can demonstrate the success of revisiting fossils that are collecting dust in museum drawers.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnlocking museum collections and bringing modern molecular and analytical techniques to specimens may well ask completely new questions of fossils that have never been studied for decades,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It may not be Jurassic Park, but a discovery by an Australian-led research team has unearthed the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":952118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[64,63,128],"class_list":["post-952117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=952117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/952118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=952117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=952117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}