Accidental Discovery of Blood, Collagen in Dinosaur Bones Could Rewrite Textbooks

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• Accidental discovery of blood, collagen in dinosaur bones could rewrite textbooks
  by http://rt.com/news/  
  An amazing discovery could rewrite textbooks, after a paleontologist accidentally found blood and soft tissue preserved in tattered dinosaur fossils. If proven, science expects answers to age-old questions, including: “Can we resurrect dinosaurs?”
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  The red blood cells and collagen fibers were discovered by chance when Imperial College London’s Sergio Bertazzo and Susannah Maidment were examining the buildup of calcium in human blood vessels. Bertazzo wanted to perform a few tests using electronic microscopes and ended up asking the Natural History Museum for some fossils to test his findings, according to the IB Times.
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  They received eight pieces, all estimated at 75 million years old.
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  What the pair found could prove we’ve consistently been looking at dinosaurs in the wrong way: it suggests that nearly every fossil science studied in the past century could contain similarly well-preserved blood and tissue samples, answering questions on dinosaur evolution, physiology, behavior, and whether their DNA could also be intact. From there on in, we’re entering sci-fi territory.
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  The accompanying study was published in the journal Nature Communications.
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  Most of the fossils studied by the pair were very poorly-preserved fragments, including toes and claws from what could be several different species.
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  While collagen – the protein that helps form skin – had previously been found in a very well-preserved bone, finding it together with blood cells in a shabby one is remarkable, according to Maidment and Bertazzo. It means we could go about re-examining every bone in the museum and come up with potentially ground-breaking findings that enable us to understand how creatures lived in prehistoric times.
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  “One morning, I turned on the microscope, increased the magnification, and thought ‘wait – that looks like blood!’” Bertazzo said, according to the Guardian. He had already been examining the fragments for months.
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  At first, the two scientists thought it might have been contamination from a museum worker with a cut on their finger. But mammal blood cells don’t contain nuclei, while these blood cells did. This fact ruled out human blood.
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