scientists are out for dinosaur blood!

Scientists said Tuesday they have discovered what appear to be red blood cells and collagen fibres in dinosaur bones, a find that may boost prospects of prising organic remains from a much wider range of fossils. Using molecular microscopy, a British team analysed eight bone fragments from dinosaurs that lived some 75 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period. The fossils were so poorly conserved that it was impossible to tell precisely what type of animal some of them came from, study co-author Sergio Bertazzo from Imperial College London told AFP. The samples included the claw of a meat-eating dinosaur, a few toe bones from a ceratopsid (a group that included the horned Triceratops) and a duck-billed hadrosaur, and rib fragments from an unknown species.