They destroyed the samples by soaking it in a weak acid TO DEMINERALIZE the fossilized samples.
First of all, there nothing wrong with my reading comprehension. The article does not say the blood cells were fossilized and then somehow de-fossilized. That's YOUR contention.
MAYBE you should rely on the PRIMARY SOURCE instead of the lyin Brian Thomas MS*.
Cortical and endosteal bone tissues were demineralized, and after 7 days, several fragments of the lining tissue exhibited unusual characteristics not normally observed in fossil bone. Removal of the mineral phase left a flexible vascular tissue that demonstrated great elasticity and resilience upon manipulation.
Hint: DE-MINERALIZED...in 0.5M EDTA, pH 8.0....EDTA is a chelating agent, something that can deal with mineral ions...you know...the stuff that makes up the "mineral" fossilized bones that need to be DE-mineralized.....soaked in EDTA for 7 days.
It sounds like they're just saying the tissues were extracted by removing the surrounding minerals. I don't know how else to interpret that in light of what's in the article, unless you're suggesting that demineralizing actually restores blood cells after they were fossilized, obviously ridiculous. If anyone here is believing that they'd have to be as stupid as your type claims creationists are.
Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”
What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.
Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html?c=y&page=1
“unless you’re suggesting that demineralizing actually restores blood cells after they were fossilized”
Actually, that’s a pretty close approximation of what happened. When the tissue mineralized, it wasn’t just encased in the mineral, as if it were dipped in concrete. It was actually chemically changed into another substance. When the chelating agent was applied, it broke the chemical bonds between the minerals and the organic tissue, thus restoring it to something like it was before becoming mineralized. The change is at the molecular level.
OMG....there was evidence of HEME in the bones!!!!
You DO know what HEME is.....right? Would you know what "evidence of heme" is? Hint....they tested for and found one of 2 things.
1) Iron.
2) A short protein sequence specific to a heme protein.
Most likely, they WERE red blood cells millions of years ago and I have nor eason to believe they were anything else millions of years ago....but what was found was not "red blood cells" like Lyin' Brian wants you to think to get you to the conclusion that Man walked the land with meat eating T. rex.
They found mineralized red blood cell structures.......and while it's a great find, I am unsurprised.