ArticleScientific reports2019
Mechanisms of soft tissue and protein preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex.
Article in Scientific reports, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis-GC-MS and supervised machine learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- In situ analysis of vascular structures in fractured Tyrannosaurus rex rib.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Fossilized dinosaur cells that defied the ravages of time - 20 years since a key discovery.Nature · 2025Article
- Evidence for Endogenous Collagen inAnalytical chemistry · 2025Article
- Taphonomic variation in vascular remains from Mesozoic non-avian dinosaurs.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Age is just a number: Examining the preservation of cells and soft tissues in Bothriolepis and other Devonian fish.PloS one · 2025Article
- Microbially mediated fossil concretions and their characterization by the latest methodologies: a review.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Review
- Biomolecular histology as a novel proxy for ancient DNA and protein sequence preservation.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Raman Spectra and Ancient Life: Vibrational ID Profiles of Fossilized (Bone) Tissues.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
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- Detection of porphyrins in vertebrate fossils from the Messel and implications for organic preservation in the fossil record.PloS one · 2022Article
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- Phylogenetic and physiological signals in metazoan fossil biomolecules.Science advances · 2020Article
- DNA from resin-embedded organisms: Past, present and future.PloS one · 2020Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The idea that original soft tissue structures and the native structural proteins comprising them can persist across geological time is controversial, in part because rigorous and testable mechanisms that can occur under natural conditions, resulting in such preservation, have not been well defined. Here, we evaluate two non-enzymatic structural protein crosslinking mechanisms, Fenton chemistry and glycation, for their possible contribution to the preservation of blood vessel structures recovered from the cortical bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex (USNM 555000 [formerly, MOR 555]). We demonstrate the endogeneity of the fossil vessel tissues, as well as the presence of type I collagen in the outermost vessel layers, using imaging, diffraction, spectroscopy, and immunohistochemistry. Then, we use data derived from synchrotron FTIR studies of the T. rex vessels to analyse their crosslink character, with comparison against two non-enzymatic Fenton chemistry- and glycation-treated extant chicken samples. We also provide supporting X-ray microprobe analyses of the chemical state of these fossil tissues to support our conclusion that non-enzymatic crosslinking pathways likely contributed to stabilizing, and thus preserving, these T. rex vessels. Finally, we propose that these stabilizing crosslinks could play a crucial role in the preservation of other microvascular tissues in skeletal elements from the Mesozoic.
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