How Does Dinosaur Soft Tissue get Preserved?

Researchers studying organic material from dinosaur bones have been able to show that the organic material in the samples contained original soft tissue material from Mesozoic dinosaurs. The x-ray techniques at the ALS were key to showing a possible mechanism for this unexpected preservation—iron nanoparticles associated with dinosaur blood vessels were identified at the ALS. Researchers hypothesized that the iron had come from dinosaurs’ blood and muscle cells during decay, and were able to identify iron-facilitated reactions that contribute to preservation. If these reactions occur in other organisms that end in the fossil record, similar preservation may allow the identification of molecular evolutionary relationships, rates and direction of evolutionary change, and eventually the characterization of other traits that have, until now, remained beyond scientists’ grasp.

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