In the 25 March issue of Science, a team led by Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh describes finding flexible and elastic blood vessels, and possibly intact cells, in the 68 million-year-old skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The skeleton was excavated in 2003 from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana by co-author Jack Horner’s crew from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. Back in the lab, Schweitzer and her technician demineralized the fragments by soaking them in a weak acid. As the fossil dissolved, transparent vessels were left behind. “It was totally shocking,” Schweitzer says. Branching vessels also appeared in fragments from a hadrosaur and another Tyrannosaurus skeleton. Many of the vessels contain red and brown structures that resemble cells. And inside these are smaller objects similar in size to the nuclei of the blood cells in modern birds.

If the cells consist of original material, paleontologists might be able to extract new information about dinosaurs. For instance, they could use the same sort of protein antibody testing that helps biologists determine the evolutionary relationships of living organisms. “There’s a reasonable chance that there may be intact proteins,” says David Martill of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. Perhaps, he says, even DNA might be extracted.

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