After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive.
rex bone-the first observation of its kind. It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T.
“Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen. “I am, like, really excited.”Īfter 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels.
