Jurassic Dinosaur Bone

There is no need to travel to Jurassic Park or the geologic past to observe dinosaur bones under a microscope. Fossilized dinosaur bones, first discovered in Europe in the 1820s, have since been unearthed on all of the continents. The structure of the organic bone matrix is preserved, most often in sedimentary rock, through mineralization of the bone on the microscopic scale by quartz crystals and other replacement compounds of silica, calcite, dolomites, carbonates, and iron.