It is assumed that Mosasaurs lived at least 65 million years ago. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
It has almost become commonplace to find soft tissue in fossils that are assumed to be millions of years old. (Read more here, here, here and here.) Recently, a research team at the University of Lund, Sweden, found collagen in a Mosasaur, a marine reptile assumed to have lived in the Late Cretaceous some 100- 65 million years ago.
The research team at Lund used several methods - infrared microspectroscopy, mass spectrometry and amino acid analysis - to ensure that the collagen hailed from the fossil and not for instance from bacteria or some another kind of contamination.
The discovery of soft tissue in a so old fossil challenges the belief in millions of years.
Once again.
Source:
Endogenous Proteins Found in a 70-Million-Year-Old Giant Marine Lizard. ScienceDaily. 2 May 2011.
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