T Rex blood extracted
T Rex blood tissue has been extracted by Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University.
Cool. So does that mean we’ll Jurassic Park for real anytime soon?
Fortunately, and unfortunately, no - what they found is a squishy mushy mess of cells and their proteins.
DNA is needed for cloning dinosaurs, and DNA is even more fragile than most proteins. When cells die and start to break down, DNA goes pretty quickly.
Let’s face it, DNA is one big complex molecule and because of its complexity, once it starts to degrade the whole code becomes a relatively useless pulp.
Getting 68 million-year old dino cells is still pretty neat, though, as normally there’s little other than minerals where the dinosaur soft stuff once was.
However, scientists have found that it they crush up some of the fossil, they can sometimes get at actual dinosaur cells, preserved within a mineral shell.
The amount extracted can be tiny - but that’s a tiny amount that connects us to the monsters of the Cretaceous period, and provides much more detail for us to try and study them.
Will Jurassic Park - or its equivalent - one day come true? Almost certainly. But not today. :)