The specimen, described in a paper Greenwalt published with museum researchers and entomologist Ralph Harbach today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is trapped in stone, not amber, and (unfortunately for Jurassic Park enthusiasts) it’s not old enough to be filled with dinosaur blood. for the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The most astounding thing about the discovery? It was made three decades ago by an amateur fossil hunter-a geology graduate student named Kurt Constenius-then left to sit in a basement, and only recognized recently by a retired biochemist named Dale Greenwalt who’s been working to collect fossils in the Western U.S. Today, it was announced that we finally have such a specimen, a blood-engorged mosquito that’s been preserved in shale rock for around 46 million years in northwestern Montana. Over the years, a few different groups of scientists have claimed to find a fossilized mosquito with ancient blood trapped in its abdomen, but each of these teams’ discoveries, in turn, turned out to be the result of error or contamination. In the 20 years since the movie Jurassic Park fantasized about how dinosaurs could be cloned from blood found in ancient amber-trapped mosquitoes, fossil collectors have been on the hunt for a similar specimen. Testing shows that a 46 million-year-old fossilized mosquito, found in Montana, contains the blood of an unknown ancient creature.
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