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Fossilized dinosaur cells that defied the ravages of time — 20 years since a key discovery

The 2005 finding of cells and blood vessels in dinosaur bone launched a systematic search for fossil remnants of biomolecules, creating innovations in methods and applications.
By
  1. Jasmina Wiemann

    1. Jasmina Wiemann is in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21210, USA, and at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution, Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, Baltimore, USA.

Scientists’ understanding of the mechanisms behind the origin and evolution of life is limited by the survival of life’s ancient building blocks over many millions of years, in deep time. For multicellular animals, these building blocks can be examined on a hierarchy of scales extending from the macroscopic level, including tissue shape and form (morphology); to the microscopic level, such as cellular networks embedded in a mesh of extracellular proteins and blood vessels; down to the molecular level, or the intricate interplay of proteins, lipids and sugars. The fossil record has long been explored for hard materials, such as shells, bones and teeth, to assess tissue morphology. By contrast, the molecular building blocks of decay-prone soft tissues were assumed to disintegrate rapidly after death owing to physical and biological stressors1. Although there had been a number of reports of soft tissues and biomolecular fragments extracted from fossils from the Mesozoic era (252 million to 65 million years ago) and Palaeozoic era (538 million to 252 million years ago)1,2, it was a landmark paper3 published in Science in 2005 by Mary Schweitzer and colleagues that prompted palaeontologists, chemists, geologists, astrobiologists and evolutionary biologists to question previous assumptions about the limitations of the fossil record.

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Nature 639, 875-876 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00733-9

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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