WASHINGTON (AP) – Scientists who had to break a dinosaur bone to remove it from its sandstone location say they have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissues from inside the bone.

The find included what appear to be blood vessels, and possibly even cells, from a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The material is currently being studied, and if scientists can isolate proteins from the material they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University said.

The find is reported in a paper appearing in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The material came from the thighbone of a T. rex, known as MOR 1125, found in a sandstone formation in Montana. The bone was broken in removing it from the site and Schweitzer and colleagues then analyzed the material inside the bone.

“The vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from … ostrich bone,” they reported.

In recent years evidence has accumulated that modern birds descended from dinosaurs, and Schweitzer said she chose to compare the dinosaur remains with those of an ostrich because it is the largest bird available.

Brooks Hanson, a deputy editor of Science, noted that there are few examples of soft tissues that have been preserved, largely leaves or petrified wood and a few examples of insects in amber or humans and mammoths in peat or ice.

But soft tissues are rare in older finds, “that’s why in a 70-million-year-old fossil is so interesting,” he said.

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