Collagen, hemoglobin, elastin, laminin and cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells have been found in a dinosaur bone scientists still claim is 80 million years old, according to a report in Science magazine today.

Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University first claimed to have isolated soft tissues and collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone several years ago.

But because the leg was broken during excavation, the evidence was damaged and could never be independently confirmed.

Schweitzer then examined a more pristine leg of a plant-eating hadrosaur excavated from sandstone and found even better samples of soft tissue, according to the report.

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"Our findings demonstrated that it did contain basement membrane matrix," said Lewis Cantley, chief of the division of signal transduction at Beth Israel Deaconess, and a co-author on the Science study. Basement membranes, which degrade and regenerate during development and wound repair, comprise a continuous extracellular matrix that links endothelial, epithelial, muscle, or neuronal cells and their adjacent stroma.

In situ mass spectrometery independently verified amino acids in dinosaur tissues, including the collagen signature amino acid, hydroxylated proline.

While scientists previously questioned the possibility that soft tissue could survive tens of millions of years of fossilization, few seem to be questioning their assumptions that dinosaurs actually went extinct 65 million years ago.

Young earth proponents see something entirely different in the findings. As one creationist noted: "There’s no way this blood could be 80 million years old. The evolutionists are just saying so because they cannot bear the thought of recent dinosaurs causing their millions of years scenario to come crashing down. Without the millions of years, Darwinism is dead, dead, dead."

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