Forget Mosquitoes in Amber. Scientists May Have Found Dinosaur Blood in a 115 Million-Year-Old Bone.

Scientists May Have Found Dinosaur Blood REMKO DE WAAL - Getty Images At first glance, the news seems like the opening lines of a Jurassic Park sequel. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , an international team of scientists reports finding traces of heme, an organic molecule that helps blood carry oxygen, in the vascular canals of a 115-million-year-old dinosaur bone. The fossil comes from the leg of Aratasaurus museunacionali , a distant relative of Velociraptor that lived during the early Cretaceous .

The fossilized bones were found in 2008 at a mine in the Romualdo Formation of northeast Brazil. The potential discovery of molecular evidence of blood inside the bones would be remarkable because, simply put, blood doesn't usually stick around very long after death.