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THE classic movie Jurassic Park was fiction. Cloning live dinosaurs from blood found in a fossilised insect is not on the cards anytime soon. But now we鈥檝e found what appears to be real dinosaur blood inside a bog-standard fossil bone.
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鈥淲e stumbled on these things completely by chance,鈥� says , whose team was trying to study bone fossilisation by cutting out tiny fragments of fossils. Instead, they found blood-like cells and collagen from 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossils 鈥� 10 million years before Tyrannosaurus rex appeared. Although the cells are unlikely to contain DNA, those extracted from better preserved fossils using the same technique may do so, she says 鈥� but there is still no evidence that they do (Nature Communications, ).
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭here鈥檚 blood in those dino bones鈥�