The Jurassic scene reappeared?

A team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP) and Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) isolated well-preserved cartilage cells from a 125 million-year-old dinosaur in northeastern China.

This dinosaur, called Caudipteryx, was an omnivorous dinosaur the size of a peacock with long tail feathers

LI Zhiheng, associate professor of IVPP and co-author of this study, said: “The geological data accumulated over the years shows that the fossil preservation of the Jehol Biota is very special, because the tiny volcanic ash buried the corpse and preserved it to the cellular level

Scientists extracted a piece of distal articular cartilage from the right femur of this specimen.

They also found two main types of cells: one is healthy cells when petrified, and the other is less healthy cells that are porous and petrified during death

Cell death is a process that occurs naturally in the life of all animals

In addition, the research team isolated some cells and stained them with chemicals used in biological laboratories around the world

The chromatin in all biological cells on earth is composed of closely packed DNA molecules

Alida Bailluel said: "To be honest, we are obviously interested in nuclear fossils, because if the DNA is preserved, most of the DNA should be here

The team insists that they need to do more analysis and even develop new methods to understand the preservation of biomolecules in dinosaur cells, because no one has ever successfully sequenced dinosaur DNA

Although more data must be collected, this study clearly shows that dinosaur fossil cells from 125 million years ago cannot be considered 100% rock

"Nuclear preservation in the cartilage of the Jehol dinosaur Caudipteryx" by Xiaoting Zheng, Alida M.