In ancient days, a mosquito bit a prehistoric creature and died in a lake in what is now Montana. Could the fossilized insect be used to create a real life "Jurassic Park?"
The 46-million-year-old mosquito was found fossilized in an exceptionally thin sliver of shale, the Associated Press reported. The preserved blood has been sitting in someone's basement among less extraordinary rocks for years, but now its secret has been revealed.
To what is sure to be some people's disappointment, the scientists won't be able to bring a T. rex back from the dead in the foreseeable future.
The fossilized mosquito buzzed the planet after the dinosaurs had already been wiped out. The team predicts the blood will most likely prove to be from an ancient bird, which is merely a descendent of the fierce dinos.
To make the idea of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead even more hopeless, scientists have already stated that the "Jurassic Park" idea of using blood from a mosquito to create clones wouldn't work in real life.
"It's following Crichton's script in that we're using a blood engorged fossil mosquito and in this case we're using the direct descendent of the dinosaurs, given that we're 20 million years late," study lead author Dale Greenwalt, who collects and analyzes insect fossils from Montana for the Smithsonian Institution, told the AP.
The team used " two different types of light-refracting x-rays" to find out the chemical composition of the fossil. They found a strong presence of iron, which suggests the mosquito still contained its last meal, a tasty batch of blood. The researchers also found traces of porphyrins, which bind to the iron in blood. The presence of these two chemicals assures the presence of ancient blood.
Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University, who did not participate in the study, believes the team did not make a "a definitive case" for the presence of blood because it did not rule out other possibilities.
