PARIS: The rib of a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that lived 195 million years ago has yielded what may be the oldest remains of soft tissue ever recovered, scientists said.
The find promises a chance to extract rare clues about the biology and evolution of long-extinct animals, a team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
Such information is mostly missing from preserved hard skeletons, which form the bulk of the fossil record.
“We have shown the presence of protein preserved in a 195 million-year-old dinosaur, at least 120 million years older than any other similar discovery,” study co-author Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga, told AFP.
“These proteins are the building blocks of animal soft tissues, and it’s exciting to understand how they have been preserved,” he added.
Reisz and a team scanned a rib bone of Lufengosaurus, a common dinosaur in the Early Jurassic period. Fully grown, these lizards measured about eight metres.
The researchers used a photon beam at the National Synchrotron Radiation
Research Center in Taiwan to examine the insides of the bone, specifically its chemical contents. — AFP