Mesozoic soft tissue!.......?

[Still_human]

Ok, I just came across articles about soft tissue remains, apparently including some form of degraded blood, in a mosasaur. That of course, brings up the T-Rex soft tissue found, to me. I seem to understand what I keep reading, but I can’t help it, again I find myself thinking...Really? C’mon, REALLY???

Am I just misinterpreting the whole thing, or is there actually real, true, gen-u-ine unfossilized/in mineralized, preserved soft tissues and blood remains in these 70ish million year old “fully” umineralized animals? 

...............HOW??????????????

How, when the rest of the animal, soft AND hard tissue has dissolved away so long ago, can any soft tissue remain? How do only small areas of the tissue remain? If conditions are so, that areas of soft tissue/blood residue remain, how do just small patches remain, but the parts immediately surrounding the patches have long since dissolved away? Conditions inside an intact bone, or intact stomach cavity, should be stable, shouldnt they? Not different from one centimeter to the next, especially so different that one spot dissolved dozens of millions of years ago, and the spot touching that one is still just sitting there, relatively preserved? 

[LordTrilobite]

Some remains isn't really surprising at all. A lot of stuff can get preserved. Soft tissues having some remains are rare, but it does happen. Now if something is not fossilised that would be something. But as far as I know that simply does not happen at all.

As far as I know the "soft" tissue in the T.rex bone had be dissolved first to remove the mineral parts. So it was most definitely a fossil, but it seems that some, I think it was collagen, that remained flexible once the mineral part was dissolved. But no DNA was found or anything.

And some remains of blood isn't surprising to me. Blood is rich in iron, and most of it will degrade. But it's not uncommon to have the surrounding matrix steeped in iron where there was a lot of blood in the carcass. Especially in tight openings in the bones themselves where blood vessels would have been. Sometimes it seems not all the blood left the body and some remained in the bone. So when you prep such a bone you'd find the same matrix in those spots, but much more iron rich.

 

And skin and feathers can preserve as well. Most of the time it's just impressions. But sometimes the original material does fossilise.

 

So yeah, most of it is fossilised, but in theory it's possible that some isolated material can remain and have a similar chemical composition as it originally had. But most of the time it's just an impression or the original material that has fossilised.

[Troodon]

Nice read

https://www.livescience.com/41537-t-rex-soft-tissue.html