FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Paleontologists Find Dinosaur Blood Cells, But the DNA Is Long Gone

Bury your "Jurassic Park" dreams.

With Jurassic World rampaging into theatres this week, dinosaur-related hype has reached an all-time high. It's no wonder, then, that a study about the discovery of "dinosaur blood," published yesterday in Nature Communications, has gotten people all riled up about the possibility of a real life Jurassic Park.

After all, the premise of the entire franchise is that Mesozoic blood, preserved by amberfied mosquitoes, is the key to resurrecting a host of fence-trashing, lawyer-eating, door-opening, gender-bending Franken-dinos. But while the new study is legitimately exciting for the paleontologically inclined, it is not a road map to Isla Nublar.

Advertisement

The problem is the notion that "dino DNA" is capable of surviving for tens of millions of years. That's what the fictional InGen scientist Henry Wu, played by BD Wong, would like you and your skeptical chaos theorist friends to believe, anyway.

Premium Henry Wu sass. Credit: MiTekneek/YouTube.

But non-fictional paleogeneticists have calculated that DNA has a half life of only about 521 years. Dinosaur fossils, meanwhile, are 66 million years old, at the bare minimum, so most of their genetic material would have degraded within about 6.3 million years. No amount of stopgap frog DNA can breach this kind of gap.

What the authors of yesterday's study found was not DNA, but the fossilized imprint of red blood cells and other soft tissue structures from a 75-million-year-old theropod dinosaur—a cousin of raptors and tyrannosaurs. This was a completely serendipitous discovery, made all the more surprising given that the researchers were using "crap" fossils, said study co-author Susannah Maidment.

"It's really difficult to get curators to allow you to snap bits off their fossils," Maidment told the Guardian. "The ones we tested are crap, very fragmentary, and they are not the sorts of fossils you'd expect to have soft tissue."

Figures a) and b) are from the theropod claw, and figures c) and d) are from an emu for comparison. Credit: Sergio Bertazzo, Susannah C. R. Maidment, Charalambos Kallepitis, Sarah Fearn, Molly M. Stevens, & Hai-nan Xie.

Maidment and her colleagues were able to identify the structures using "electron microscopy and a focused ion beam (FIB), as part of a novel method to prepare samples for mass spectrometry," according to the study. The fact that this technique unveiled a hidden panoply of fossilized soft tissue bodes well for future paleontological research. If even poorly preserved fossils can offer up this kind of detail, it could shed light on all kinds of outstanding questions about dinosaur biology.

Advertisement

But alas, what this new research can't do is bring dinosaurs back from the dead. I was pleasantly surprised to see that most articles circulating about this research take pains to spell this fact out upfront, sometimes even in their headlines.

It seems that in general, the public has made peace the fact that de-extinction efforts will probably never extend to dinosaurs

There are a few outliers that use the "one step closer to Jurassic Park" angle, but it seems that in general, the public has made peace the fact that de-extinction efforts will probably never extend to dinosaurs, so the media hasn't really been stoking those fires as fervently as it used to.

Indeed, this unusual restraint is likely the result of over two decades of speculation about the real world legitimacy of the franchise's premise. Since the publication of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park in 1990, many false idol iterations of "the real Jurassic Park" have surfaced over the years, inspired by experiments with chicken DNA to the controversy over cloning recently extinct animals.

Paleontologists are occasionally complicit in these fakeouts, understandably so. Dinosaur movies can provide a lucrative tide of publicity for an otherwise strapped field, prompting teams to deliberately arrange for their studies to be published in tandem with new installments of the franchise. Given that paleontologist Mary Schweitzer pegged her 1993 study about potential T-Rex soft tissue to Jurassic Park's release, it may be no coincidence that this "dinosaur blood" was announced just in time for Jurassic World.

I have nothing against paleontologists using pop culture events to drum up grant money—just the opposite. But I'm still glad that we seem to have all soured on the idea that every single story about dinosaur genetics is somehow an omen that Jurassic Park is becoming a reality. Much like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, you can only cry "raptor" so long before the claim loses its edge.