In most cases, microbes feast on a dead animal's soft tissue, destroying it within weeks.
The tissue must be something else, perhaps the product of a later bacterial invasion, critics argued.
The blood vessels soaked in red blood cells remain recognizable after sitting at room temperature for two years.
[Paleo-Art: Illustrations Bring Dinosaurs to Life]Searching for soft tissue Dinosaurs' iron-rich blood, combined with a good environment for fossilization, may explain the amazing existence of soft tissue from the Cretaceous (a period that lasted from about 65.5 million to 145.5 million years ago) and even earlier.
What followed was the adoption of certain practices that improved safety and reduced the environmental impact...
A trip to your local supermarket is always a fun one, with tasty snacks tempting you in every aisle.
The specimens Schweitzer works with, including skin, show evidence of excellent preservation.
The bones of these various specimens are articulated, not scattered, suggesting they were buried quickly.
They've even found chemicals consistent with being DNA, though Schweitzer is quick to note that she hasn't proven they really are DNA.
The iron-removing techniques should allow paleontologists to search more effectively for soft tissue, and to test it when they find it."Once we can get the chemistry behind some of these soft tissues, there's all sorts of questions we can ask of ancient organisms," Schweitzer said.
Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent tissue?
The find was also controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions.
’ Unfortunately, if you’ve taken any trips to the mall in...