WHILE literary types try to “suck the marrow out of life”, palaeontologists would like to extract it from fossil bones.
Now Maria McNamara of University College Dublin, Ireland, has found the first fossilised bone marrow in frogs that lived 10 million years ago. The discovery shows that decay-prone tissue can survive for an astonishingly long time, even in small amphibian bones.
McNamara was studying frog fossils from Spanish sulphur mines when she noticed bone marrow in a bone that had split. Curious, she examined other fossils and found preserved marrow in 10 per cent of the adult frogs. Electron microscopy…
