An international team of scientists believe they have found red blood cells in 115 million years old dinosaur bones for the very first time.

Researchers have hailed a “landmark discovery” after analysing the limb bones of a juvenile, meat-eating dinosaur called an Aratasaurus and identifying numerous microscopic structures that appear to be fossilised red blood cells.

The dinosaur bones had been unearthed in a gypsum mine in the Ceará state in northeastern Brazil in 2008 and kept at the National Museum of Brazil where researchers continued to examine them.

Kliti Grice, the study’s co-author and chemist at Curtin University in Australia, said: “We have not found a vial of dinosaur blood.…