Paleontologists have recovered what appear to be soft tissues from the thighbone of a 70 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex, potentially enabling dinosaur research to make a leap into the study of the animals’ actual physiology and perhaps even their cell biology, they said today.
Working with the remains of a T. rex unearthed in northeast Montana’s celebrated Hell Creek formation, the research team systematically removed minerals and fossilized deposits from the thighbone, exposing blood vessels, bone cells and possibly intact blood cells with nuclei.