Inside the Bones

Intro
In 2005, Mary Schweitzer and her team shocked the paleontological world when they reported, in the journal Science, that they had come upon soft tissue surviving deep within the fossilized thigh bone of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. The tissue included transparent, stretchy, and still-soft structures that looked like blood vessels, along with possible red blood cells. Surprised as anyone by the discovery, Schweitzer (above), a paleontologist and research curator at North Carolina State University, decided she had to see if it was a fluke. Did other ancient fossils harbor such prizes? Here, see what Schweitzer and her team brought to light from bones as old as 78 million years.—Peter Tyson

Note: We focus on the apparent blood vessels here, but Schweitzer's team found other soft tissues, including bone-building cells and fibrous bone matrix. For the full story, see her team's 2005 and 2007 papers on the findings, referenced in Links & Books.

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