After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
The discovery was astonishing. The scientist Dr. Mary Schweitzer discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. No one ever imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. When an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors.
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