Blood and skin cells found on 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones:

Blood and skin cells found on 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones:

Red blood cells and the remains of skin from dinosaurs more than 75 million years old have been discovered by scientists.
Palaeontologists found the rare soft tissue on eight dinosaur fossils that have spent more than a century in storage at the Natural History Museum in London.
The discovery is expected to result in scientists re-examining other old fossils with modern techniques in an attempt to find soft tissue that may be preserved there.

While soft tissue has been found on dinosaur fossils in the past, it is extremely rare and has only ever been found in extremely well preserved samples subject to unusual conditions after death.
In most cases it was thought the organic tissue like skin, muscle and blood would quickly decay away after death leaving just the harder bones to mineralise and become fossils.

COULD SOFT TISSUE BE USED TO CLONE DINOSAURS?
With the release of Jurassic World in cinemas, the idea of cloning extinct dinosaurs from DNA extracted from insects preserved in amber is receiving new attention.
In the original Jurassic Park scientists extract 80-million-year-old DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber.
However, recent research has shown that DNA is unlikely to ever survive that long.
But the discovery of proteins like collagen on fossilised dinosaur remains will raise hopes that it may be possible to find remaining DNA.
However, even if that is possible, the fragments will be too small to allow scientists to ever hope to build a genome complete enough to clone the ancient reptiles and bring them back to life.
Indeed, red blood cells, like those found in the most recent study, contain no genetic material at all.
With the discovery of collagen fibres - a particularly strong protein - it may be possible to reconstruct the short gene that codes for them by studying the structure of the protein.
However, even that may be pushing what is possible as the level of preservation may not be good enough.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3117137/Blood-skin-cells-75-million-year-old-dinosaur-bones-Tissue-extracted-fossils-left-storage-century.html#ixzz3cwqPuCh9
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Re: Blood and skin cells found on 75-million-year-old dinosaur bones:

there are living organisms much older than that that havent changed at all such as extremeophile bactiria so im not suprised cells could survive that long.