An international team led by Curtin University in Perth has produced the first chemical proof of dinosaur blood in a fossil, publishing the findings on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Lead author Prof. Kliti Grice described it as “a landmark discovery.”
The team studied fossilised limb bones of Aratasaurus museunacionali, a theropod that lived around 115 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous. The leg fossil was recovered in 2008 from the Romualdo Formation in north-eastern Brazil, at a site known as Mina Pedra Branca.
Inside the bone’s vascular canals — the channels that once carried blood vessels — researchers found microscopic ellipsoidal structures, roughly 23 by 20 micrometres, resembling red blood cells.
Chemical analysis using HPLC-mass spectrometry, laser spectroscopy and electron microscopy detected heme B — the oxygen-carrying component of hemoglobin — plus a diagenetically altered derivative (3,8-diethyl heme B) inside those structures. It is the first time hemoglobin-derived molecules have been chemically proven within cell-like structures in a dinosaur fossil. Collagen amino acids were also identified.
The structures survived because of hausmannite, a manganese oxide mineral that acted like a “natural time capsule,” stabilising them over deep time.
There are caveats: this is not intact blood or hemoglobin, only mineralised chemical remnants — and the interpretation is contested. Prof. Mary Schweitzer of NC State told Science the structures lack the clear nuclei seen in modern bird and crocodile red blood cells, so the debate remains active. Still, Grice says the finding challenges the assumption that biomolecules like hemoglobin cannot survive deep time.
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