A new study may burst the bubble of dinosaur buffs by contradicting an exciting announcement of three years ago: what was earlier identified as soft tissue preserved in the thigh bone of a Tyrannosaurus fossil is actually just modern-day bacteria, researchers say. The new study challenges the work done by paleontologist Mary Schweitzer, who
garnered headlines in 2005 for reporting in the journal Science [that her team] had found the remains of blood vessels inside the fossils unearthed in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Finding tissue preserved at least 65 million years shocked paleontologists who believed any such traces were lost forever [USA Today].
For the new study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, paleontologist Thomas Kaye
went to the same formation where Schweitzer's sample came from, dug up a 65-million-year-old dinosaur bone, cracked it open, and looked at it [Reuters].
He saw the same branching structures that Schweitzer ...
