{"id":246546,"date":"2026-11-04T18:20:23","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T00:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/did-scientists-just-find-115-million-year-old-dinosaur-blood"},"modified":"2026-11-04T18:20:23","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T00:20:23","slug":"did-scientists-just-find-115-million-year-old-dinosaur-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/did-scientists-just-find-115-million-year-old-dinosaur-blood","title":{"rendered":"Did scientists just find 115-million-year-old dinosaur blood?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Blood cells don\u2019t fossilize very easily. Most break down shortly after death, and certain minerals can mimic the blobby shape of cells under a microscope, making the prospect of finding convincing traces of very ancient blood\u2014say, as old as dinosaurs\u2014far-fetched. Yet that\u2019s what scientists say they\u2019ve uncovered in a paper published today in the <em>Proceedings of the National Academy of <i>Science<\/i>s<\/em>. With multiple lines of evidence, the international team behind the new study claims the remains from a 115-million-year-old dinosaur from Brazil contain <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/cgi\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2614248123\">the oldest fossilized red blood cells ever discovered<\/a>. But some experts remain skeptical.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s probably the most comprehensive effort that\u2019s been done so far,\u201d says Maria McNamara, a paleobiologist at University College Cork who was not involved in the new work. But, she adds, \u201cI would be very cautious about interpreting those necessarily as red blood cells.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For decades, researchers have tried to find irrefutable evidence of dinosaur blood in fossils. Finding and characterizing blood cells from dinosaurs could help paleontologists learn more about how they adapted to their environments, says Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University who in 2005 claimed to have found <a href=\"https:\/\/www.science.org\/doi\/10.1126\/science.1108397\">blood vessels and red blood cell\u2013like structures in a <em>Tyrannosaurus rex<\/em> bone<\/a>, but who wasn\u2019t involved in the new study. At least 14 studies have attempted to describe red blood cells found in dinosaur and other very old fossils before. But such claims must rule out contamination and look-alikes, and none of these previous studies has broadly convinced other experts in the field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blood cells don\u2019t fossilize very easily. Most break down shortly after death, and certain minerals can mimic the blobby shape of cells under a microscope, making the prospect of finding convincing traces of very ancient blood\u2014say, as old as dinosaurs\u2014far-fetched. Yet that\u2019s what scientists say they\u2019ve uncovered in a paper published today in the Proceedings [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}