{"id":24477,"date":"2025-09-15T21:22:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T21:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/24477\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T21:22:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T21:22:08","slug":"dinosaur-hemoglobin-may-have-been-discovered-in-fossils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/24477\/","title":{"rendered":"Dinosaur hemoglobin may have been discovered in fossils"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Key Insights<\/p>\n

Using a spectroscopy technique on dinosaur fossils has revealed the presence of hemoglobin in blood vessel\u2013like structures.<\/p>\n

The discovery, in Tyrannosaurus rex and Brachylophosaurus canadensis fossils, may advance a debate on whether soft tissue can be preserved over time.<\/p>\n

Scientists believe these tissues could provide crucial details on dinosaur physiology, appearance, and genetic relatedness.<\/p>\n

Scientists have announced the discovery of damaged hemoglobin in the hollow, blood vessel\u2013like structures of dinosaur fossils. The researchers used a novel technique they hope may put an enduring controversy to rest.<\/p>\n

Twenty years ago, Mary Schweitzer<\/a>, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU), and colleagues reported in the journal Science that they\u2019d found<\/a> elastic, vessel-like structures in dissolved bits of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex femur unearthed in Montana.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from extant ostrich bone,\u201d they wrote in the paper. (Like all birds, ostriches descended from dinosaurs.) But many of Schweitzer’s colleagues never fully embraced this discovery, even after she discovered<\/a> similar structures in an 80-million-year-old Brachylophosaurus canadensis specimen, also from Montana.<\/p>\n

There is a long-standing debate about whether dinosaur soft tissue persists over millions of years, with some paleontologists doubting this is even possible. Schweitzer believes these tissues could provide crucial details on dinosaur physiology, appearance, and genetic relatedness.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the bias in the community is that these things can\u2019t preserve,\u201d she tells C&EN. \u201cI mean, we\u2019ve used over two dozen methods now to demonstrate the presence of organic molecules in deep-time fossils. And it still is not well accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her new study, published recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A (DOI: 10.1098\/rspa.2025.0175), Schweitzer took a different tack: using a form of Raman spectroscopy to find evidence of hemoglobin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Resonance to the rescue<\/p>\n

Schweitzer first reached out to physicist Hans Hallen<\/a>, also at NCSU, who specializes in Raman spectroscopy, which uses a laser to illuminate a substance and then analyze the light that scatters off its surface.<\/p>\n

But dealing with ancient remains is not simple. \u201cMolecularly, fossils are a mess,\u201d Hallen says, with different compounds at various levels of degradation that make the results difficult to interpret. So Hallen, Schweitzer, and their collaborators decided to use resonance Raman instead, which aims for specific molecules.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you use the precise wavelength of light that is absorbed by the molecule, it has the effect of making the Raman signal much bigger,\u201d he explains. \u201cThis way, you can look for one specific molecular type.\u201d To verify if the vessels found in the T. rex and B. canadensis fossils contain traces of blood, they decided to look for hemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood of most vertebrate animals.<\/p>\n

Hemoglobin consists of four sets of a ring-shaped molecule surrounding an iron atom, the heme\u2014which is where the oxygen binds\u2014connected to a large, rounded protein, the globin. If these two parts were still connected, Hallen and colleagues determined, a green (532 nm) laser should be ideal to amplify their signal. That was exactly what happened in both fossils.<\/p>\n

To double-check they weren\u2019t just looking at heme-like structures left behind by bacteria, the researchers also tried a blue (473 nm) laser more likely to resonate with heme molecules not bound to proteins. This wavelength didn\u2019t resonate much if at all, strengthening the earlier results.<\/p>\n

The wavelength shifts in the scattered light also suggest that the hemoglobin isn\u2019t entirely intact. Specific outer parts of the ring appear to be broken, which would be expected in such old material.<\/p>\n

Probing preservation in color patterns<\/p>\n

The study also unveils new information about the dark-light patterns detected in the ancient vessels. One of the detected-wavelength peaks suggests that the lighter areas may represent ferric oxyhydroxide (FeOOH) crystals of a mineral known as goethite, caused by the oxygenation of the central iron atom in the heme.<\/p>\n

This may have absorbed enough oxygen to create alternating areas rich in oxygen, where crystals were formed, and poor in oxygen, where the iron atom may instead have driven a cycle of reduction and oxidation that created crosslinks between the proteins, resulting in stiffer, darker material.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this way, hemoglobin might actually have helped the preservation of this material,\u201d says Schweitzer, who has long suspected this might be the case. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen the beginnings of very similar processes in ostrich bones that we tried to artificially age, sometimes in the presence of additional hemoglobin, to study its impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the T. rex samples have better-preserved heme and better-formed goethite than those of the much older Brachylophosaurus, which may indicate a change with age or be due to the different conditions in which the fossils\u2014both found in sandstone\u2014were buried.<\/p>\n

Dinosaur debate persists<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think this work settles the debate on the preservation potential of blood in dinosaur blood vessels, but it does provide another piece of the puzzle,\u201d says Valentina Rossi<\/a>, a paleobiologist at University College Cork who studies the preservation of soft tissue in fossils and was not involved in this study. \u201cMore work will be required to validate this application in other fossils.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cResonance Raman spectroscopy seems to be very good at identifying hemoglobin in biological tissues and in forensic settings,\u201d she adds. \u201cBut whether iron-rich organic matter not derived from blood can give false positive results needs to be tested further. I would have loved to see the resonance Raman signals of other organic matter found in association with the fossil bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such material was not collected in this case, as the bones were museum items found many years ago. Even so, she says, \u201cI hope that researchers excavating new fossils will make sure to collect it for comparison.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hallen and Schweitzer say they have a lot of work to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did two dinosaurs in this work,\u201d Hallen says, \u201cbut there\u2019s at least half a dozen more of different types of dinosaurs of different ages buried in different environments to look at. It\u2019s time to buckle down.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Chemical & Engineering News<\/p>\n

ISSN 0009-2347<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9
\n 2025 American Chemical Society<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 Key Insights Using a spectroscopy technique on dinosaur fossils has revealed the presence of hemoglobin in blood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[24953,6580,8322,23925,111,139,69,147,24954,6582],"class_list":["post-24477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-biological-chemistry","tag-dinosaurs","tag-fossils","tag-hemoglobin","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-trex","tag-tyrannosaurus-rex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}