‘Landmark discovery:’ Dinosaur blood found in fossils for the first time — and it could advance search for life in the cosmos

It’s a bloody big find.

Australian scientists have identified fossilized blood in dinosaur bones for the first time, rewriting our understanding of fossil preservation — and even suggesting that similarly delicate traces of life exist elsewhere in the cosmos.

“This really is a landmark discovery,” Kliti Grice, a study co-author and chemist at Curtin University in Australia, declared in a statement.

Per the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the prehistoric plasma was discovered in a 115-million-year-old leg fossil recovered from a mine in Brazil in 2008.

This limb belonged to a juvenile Aratasaurus museunacionali, a medium-sized theropod that lived during the early Cretaceous period, Popular Science reported.

The fossils suggest a creature that measured 10 feet long and tipped the scales at 75 pounds, although researchers theorized that the animal grew quite a bit larger based on the relatively young age of the remains.

Inside the fossils were vascular canals that contained red blood cells. While potential red blood cell fossils had been discovered before, this marked the first study to chemically confirm the presence of hemoglobin-derived molecules.

By subjecting the sample to highly sensitive chemical analysis, the researchers were able to detect and measure different substances, including high levels of preserved heme — the oxygen-carrying component of hemoglobin.

Also present was a complex manganese oxide called hausmannite, which helped maintain the heme’s cellular structure and additional blood biomolecules found in the blood, such as the amino acids in collagen.

How did these fragile soft tissues survive for so long? The researchers theorized that the Aratasaurus was quickly buried in an environment that was high in microbes but low in oxygen.

Grice theorized that the “manganese mineralization” may have helped stabilize or replicate the delicate cell structures during fossilization, reshaping our understanding of molecular longevity.

“These findings challenge longstanding assumptions that certain biomolecules such as hemoglobin cannot survive deep time,” she declared. “

By analyzing our primeval predecessor’s plasma, researchers can glean earth-shattering insights into ancient life, according to Grice.

Further analysis could help deepen our understanding of everything from the evolution of blood to dinosaur activity levels.

This ancient blood test even has implications for the search for extraterrestrial life.

If these fragile molecules can exist for millions of years, similar traces could potentially persist elsewhere in the cosmos.

It’s also yet unclear how this discovery might affect the ongoing campaigns to bioengineer extinct animals from scratch.