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Science

Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found (scientificamerican.com) 93

Posted by BeauHD from the land-before-time dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as an Apatosaurus femur or as impressive as a Tyrannosaurus jaw. The object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby hadrosaur called Hypacrosaurus that perished more than 70 million years ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA. [...] In a study published earlier this year, Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Alida Bailleul and her colleagues proposed that in that fossil, they had found not only evidence of original proteins and cartilage-creating cells but a chemical signature consistent with DNA.

Recovering genetic material of such antiquity would be a major development. Working on more recently extinct creatures -- such as mammoths and giant ground sloths -- paleontologists have been able to revise family trees, explore the interrelatedness of species and even gain some insights into biological features such as variations in coloration. DNA from nonavian dinosaurs would add a wealth of new information about the biology of the "terrible lizards." Such a find would also establish the possibility that genetic material can remain detectable not just for one million years, but for tens of millions. The fossil record would not be bones and footprints alone: it would contain scraps of the genetic record that ties together all life on Earth. Yet first, paleontologists need to confirm that these possible genetic traces are the real thing. Such potential tatters of ancient DNA are not exactly Jurassic Park -- quality. At best, their biological makers seem to be degraded remnants of genes that cannot be read -- broken-down components rather than intact parts of a sequence. Still, these potential tatters of ancient DNA would be far older (by millions of years) than the next closest trace of degraded genetic material in the fossil record. "If upheld, Bailleul and her colleagues' findings would indicate that biochemical traces of organisms can persist for tens of millions of years longer than previously thought," the report adds. "And that would mean there may be an entire world of biological information experts are only just getting to know."
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Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found More

Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found

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  • No, we're not going to have 'Jurassic Park' for real, forget about it.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by queefer ( 6763638 )
      It's a Friday night, and Rick Schumann (not his real name BTW) gets first post. Finally accomplishes *SOMETHING* in life.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by queefer ( 6763638 )
        Rick Schumann is also the only other possible human reading Slash-Dead and just modded me down.
    • Do NOT clone them. Seriously, just don't do it. Not even on a super-secure private island. Just don't. Really.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      No, we're not going to have 'Jurassic Park' for real, forget about it.

      Quoted against the censorious troll, but someone should remod the original Funny again.

    • it's ok as long as there are no raptors

  • From the archives (Score:4, Informative)

    by Camel Pilot ( 78781 ) on Friday April 17, 2020 @11:52PM (#59960776) Homepage Journal

    Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer have been publishing papers on finding red blood cells and soft tissue deep inside dino bones way back in the 90's. So this is not altogether surprising.

    https://www.nytimes.com/1993/0... [nytimes.com]

    • Yes. But RFTT : someone is claiming having found dinosaur DNA. (A claim whose merits I'll discuss shortly.)

      Red blood cells don't contain significant DNA of their own. They're a build & forget cell type, not one that can reproduce. That's why they have an average 80-day lifetime.

      Schweitzer claims (in the face of significant technical questioning) to have isolated dinosaurian collagen - the commonest protein in the vertebrate body - not DNA either.

      Finally, the paper has opened for me in another window

  • I just ate a dinosaur and threw its bones in the trash. Can I get a big fat grant and the front page? Whats the big deal?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Think of the 1960, 1970 and later collected material all over the world waiting for new criminal testing.
      Every new DNA advancement in the news is a someone thinking back....
      Police work is waiting globally.
      All the criminals, police informants, mil, gov workers, police, contractors ... the DNA is still waiting..
      What a city, state, mil, gov failed to test years later... more testing can be asked for later :)
      City, state police did not test for some reason ... can be requested years later.
      • And an awful lot of such potential cases are severely open to challenge on grounds of inadequate storage or a broken chain of custody - which are essentially problems of legal process, not science. Plus, of course, you've got to have both the suspect sample from the murder (rape, kidnap, whatever) materials, and a suspect to tie it to. If you don't have a suspect to challenge for producible DNA (again, a legal problem, not a technical or scientific problem), your cold case remains cold.

        And where you've got

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )

      I just ate a dinosaur and threw its bones in the trash. Can I get a big fat grant and the front page? Whats the big deal?

      From the summary: DNA from nonavian dinosaurs would add a wealth of new information

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • You can do that now. You just need teeth, superglue, and someone else to hold the hens, because you know they won't be happy.

      • Or horses their toes.

        • That, on the other hand, is something that horses occasionally do for themselves. It's rare - rarer than 6-toe cats, I think - but not unknown.
      • That was done at the proof-of-concept level (they killed the chicks after about a week of development, long before viable hatching) back in the late-80s or so. A couple of the right chemicals in the right place in the embryo, at the right time and "Dracula" is your embryo's nickname.
    • There's a difference between a dinosaur and a bucket of chicken from KFC.
      • There really isnâ(TM)t. If dinosaurs are resurrected from aeons old DNA, I for one will demand to know how they taste with BBQ sauce.
        • And I for one, will be listening attentively to the non-Avian Dinosaur Overlords and recommending the Happy Welsh Wizard with a serving of barbecue sauce applied to their entrails, served screaming on a bed of ... well, anything.

          Actually, I don't think I've ever got barbecue sauce into a cut. I assume it hurts - probably quite salty - but I don't remember ever trying the experiment. And I can't remember the last time I saw the stuff, let alone used it.

  • Dinosaurs at wet markets and giant dinosaur viruses jumping species.

    • We still eat mammoths.

      In 1901, an expedition to the Beresovca River in Siberia found a male mammoth so exquisitely preserved that it still had grass in its mouth. The mammoth’s bones and skin were put on display in St. Petersburg, and its flesh was, supposedly, served at a “mammoth banquet.” The meal was a hit, according to one glowing account, ”particularly the course of mammoth steak, which all the learned guests declared was agreeable to the taste, and not much tougher than some of the sirloin furnished by butchers of today.”

      https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/permafrozen-dinner/604069/ [theatlantic.com]

      • "Still" and "1901" is a wee bit of a stretch.

        That said, if we ever clone one of the fuckers I'll be first in line for a bite.

      • For certain values of "we".

        But if you happen to be working in Siberia (or Alaska, or Nunavut), then it's something to keep the ear to the grapevine for. If the meat has been kept cold enough in the ground to not actually be rotting, then it might be worth a try. You'd want to cook it well, and probably slice it thinly (parasite eggs & cysts of various sorts), but if you're working a Siberian exploration camp, it's probably going to be no worse than the food you get day to day. I didn't have any huge p

    • Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @05:06AM (#59961236) Homepage

      Giant viruses actually exist - Mimivirus, Megavirus, Pandoravirus, Pithovirus, etc. They can be even bigger than the smallest bacteria. But they infect amoebas. And there's good reason for this.

      Many human viruses are amazingly simple beasts - less than a dozen genes. The reason for this is simple: the less there is to copy, and the less you have to build, the more rapidly you can churn out copies. But there is a downside: you're highly dependent on the host's internal workings; if something about how the host's cells works changes, they can easily break your replication process.

      This usually isn't a problem for viruses that infect complex organisms; they evolve so slowly compared to the viruses themselves. But it's a big problem for viruses that infect tiny organisms. Solution: don't rely on the host organism to do much of anything for you; carry the genes to do almost everything, as if you were a complete organism - even making your own nucleotides. Inject them straight into the cytosol. Now the host is at a serious disadvantage; it can't simply "break" the virus by making small changes to how it works; the virus takes care of almost everything it needs except for stealing basic metabolic processes.

      The only downside is the aforementioned size; you have to build really big viruses. The net result is that you need a really big microbe to act as the host. Hence: amoebas.

      BTW - Pithovirus is unknown from modern times. It was found in 30k year old ice. Still perfectly alive and infectious.

      • Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @05:29AM (#59961252) Homepage

        I've actually gained a lot of respect for the destructive beauty of viruses lately. There's so much going on with them. There's even symbiotic viruses [nih.gov]. A couple types of viruses work with bacteria to create drug-resistant, extremely durable biofilms. These films are basically composites - they consist of polymers held together by filaments, which help them form into an orderly liquid crystal structure. The filaments in some cases can be filamentous viruses themselves. These bacteriopages do not usually kill their hosts, but rather reproduce through the lysogenic cycle, where the viral DNA is incorporated into the nucleus and only randomly becomes activated in individuals. The viruses not only function as structural reinforcement, but also act as a vector for sharing genetic information - so if one member of the biofilm evolves antibiotic resistance, it's possible for it to be spread to other members, or even distant bacteria.

        The balancing act of mutation is also interesting to me. We often think of viral mutation rates as being high "because it's genetically advantageous", but really, it appears to be more of a challenge to not mutate so fast. Most have no proofreading, because that costs extra genes, and thus robs them of virulence. Hence, abundant errors are inevitable. It's been shown in tests that just slightly increasing a virus's mutation rate can cause it to die off; they live on the bleeding edge of what they can sustain, producing a huge number of broken or attenuated copies, but just enough remain functional and aggressive for them to be able to continue an infection.

        Even for those that work, they have a difficult "life", particularly when it comes to infecting others. Viruses have massive surface area to volume ratios, which make them highly vulnerable to environmental damage. Unlike bacteria, they cannot repair themselves. They cannot "feed" on alternative food sources. They just "die". Even when you're exposed to viruses, a given virus only has a minute chance of infecting you. The mean minimal infectious dose of common virulent respiratory diseases appears to be about 100 virus particles or so, give or take for the disease. For some types of viral diseases that number can be orders of magnitude higher.

        Being unable to defend themselves against damage, some viruses have learned tricks. Smallpox viruses are just as vulnerable as any other to environmental damage. So they evolved to be shed from scabs, surrounded by dead skin cells. These dead cells act as a natural armour that allows the viruses to stay active and infectious for protracted periods of time outside the body.

      • Are you concerned that sooner or later, when we extract viruses from places where modern humans previously had no exposure to them -- be it a core sample of ancient ice, or a cave in Yunnan Province [washingtonpost.com] -- we will encounter something we're wholly unprepared for?

        I'm not just concerned; I believe it has already happened.

        • Not really - because it has almost certainly happened time and time again through history. The only reason we're getting to worry about it these days is that the number of remote villages which don't communicate with the outside world for 6 or 8 months is decreasing steeply as communications improve. Plus, of course, fewer people are dieing of the big infectious killers (smallpox, measles, cholera, typhoid) so the occasional complete wiping out of a village (or city) seems more important than it is.

          The 50-

  • Doubtful, looks like contamination (Score:5, Informative)

    by skoskav ( 1551805 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @01:28AM (#59960890)

    The oldest DNA sequenced from a fossil came from a 700,000 year old [smithsonianmag.com] horse frozen in ice. The oldest confirmed protein so far is from a 1.77 million year old rhino tooth.. From the best estimate so far, the half-life of DNA is at 521 years [nih.gov] under good conditions, meaning that every DNA bond should be broken after a theoretical maximum of 6.8 million years. [livescience.com]

    One of the lead researchers is Mary Schweitzer, a Young Earth Creationist with a decades long history of making these extraordinary and non-reproducible claims. [sciencemag.org] To think that this team managed to bump up the current record by two orders of magnitude is doubtful. Contamination of the fossils in the last million-or-so years seems more likely to me.

    • "That's worrying," says Maria McNamara, a paleontologist at University College Cork in Ireland. "If you are going to make claims for preservation, you really need to have tight arguments. At this point I don't think we are quite there."

      My preferred kind, definitely.

    • Re:Doubtful, looks like contamination (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 18, 2020 @03:16AM (#59961098)

      Actually, it seems like she's a *former* YEC:

      Over the next 6 months, Horner opened Schweitzer's eyes to the overwhelming evidence supporting evolution and Earth's antiquity. "He didn't try to convince me," Schweitzer says. "He just laid out the evidence."

      She rejected many fundamentalist views, a painful conversion. "It cost me a lot: my friends, my church, my husband." But it didn't destroy her faith. She felt that she saw God's handiwork in setting evolution in motion. "It made God bigger," she says.

      She may have made unsubstantiated claims, but there's no need to mischaracterise her, either.

      • Re:Doubtful, looks like contamination (Score:4, Informative)

        by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday April 18, 2020 @05:50AM (#59961268) Homepage

        Wow, glad you posted that. I just read through that ScienceMag article after seeing how Schweitzer was misrepresented, and that was blatant. The article presents an entirely different picture than the GP presents it as. Both about Schweitzer, and the quality of her research and what peers think of it (a mix of both allies and foes).

        It's one thing to say "the jury is out". But it's entirely different to pretend like Schweitzer is a young-earth-creationist peddling theories that all "real" paleontologists feel are fantasies. The article brought up the YEC thing in reference to her learning to abandon the doctrinaire views with which she was raised (at significant personal cost).

        Often, the greatest discoveries are made by exploring the fuzzy edge of a field, the parts around which their is disagreement and inconsistency. Even when they turn out to not be what you originally thought they were, the exploration process opens whole new grounds for learning unexpected things. The article discusses even some of her critics doing experiments to look for organic compounds and finding them (such as cholesterol and melanin) - just not certain ones (such as amino acids). And then discussing the published counters to those experiments.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Example quote from the article:

          She adds that her team is finding more than collagen: It has recovered sequences from eight proteins isolated from what appear to be blood vessels, all matching common vessel proteins such as actin, tubulin, and hemoglobin. It's hard to imagine that all stem from contamination, Schroeter says. "At what point does contamination become so unlikely that it's not a parsimonious explanation?" she asks.

          In January, Schweitzer's team reported in the Journal of Proteome Research (JPR)

      • Thanks for the correction. I missed that part of the story.

    • From the best estimate so far, the half-life of DNA is at 521 years [nih.gov] under good conditions

      The dinosaur research in question seems completely dubious, but on this specific point: Haven't we grown viable seeds which are much older than this, suggesting that there are ways to store DNA which make it last much longer?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        Yes, and yes. Silene stenophylla (narrow-leafed campion), 31,8kya, is the record. The seeds had been damaged in a way that prevented germination, but with assistance in germinating, they grew into perfectly healthy plants.

        It all depends on the environment.

        • This is the kind of work that, if you extend it, may give hope to recovering these lost DNA strands. While the DNA itself may not last millions of years, under the right circumstances it may degrade in a way that could be scanned and recreated artificially. Think of it as finding an ancient set of buried ruins. The structures have collapsed, and been moved about a bit, and as such are no longer useable, but with the careful mapping of where each stone came from, the original layout, construction, and eve

      • The 521 year figure comes from a burial temperature of 13 degrees Celsius. For seeds the standard for long-term conservation [google.com] requires a temperature of -18 Celsius or colder and 3-7% moisture, which is estimated to keep seeds viable for 100 years. Though this standard is typically applied for staple crops such as wheat and rice, which didn't evolve in an environment with harsh winters.

        Viable ancient seeds older than tens of thousands of years on the other hand may have evolved using tactics that lend themsel

        • Dinosaurs living in the Cretaceous Period (145 to 66 million years ago) didn't have poles or much in the way of ice for their preservation, considering the high global average temperatures up until relatively recently

          You're ... phrasing it poorly. The Cretaceous Earth certainly had poles and a rotation axis. But with those poles being either at sea, or on a continent that stretched to the equator, the ocean currents were very different and a lot more heat was moved between latitudes than in today's climate,

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by axedog ( 991609 )
      Hypotheses should be evaluated based on the evidence in support of them; not on the individuals involved. If you can debunk the claims made, please do so by facts and evidence; not by an ad hominem attack one one of the researchers involved.

      • Hypotheses should be evaluated based on the evidence in support of them; [...]

        I disagree. They should be evaluated based on their predictability and repeatedly failed falsification [wikipedia.org] attempts, which is how the modern scientific method operates.

        [...] not on the individuals involved. If you can debunk the claims made, please do so by facts and evidence; not by an ad hominem attack one one of the researchers involved.

        Yup, I argued against a potential bias of the researcher, which is a circumstantial ad hominem. I tried to show how a lacking credibility and history of crying wolf tainted her findings. The scientific community should be attentive to these red flags for added context, for much the same reason why research papers have to disclose funding and pote

  • This is the perfect task for AI .. analyze millions of incomplete DNA fragments and find the perfect combination which will represent a T-Rex. Then inject it into a frog and .. profit.

  • The sale of Dino meat.

  • But if they could recreate a dinosaur, Chinese scientists would do it. Remember the CRISPR baby thing? Yeah.

  • Would not be first time someone has made a similar claim later proven to be just plain wrong. More study needed I guess. Anywho, direct DNA reading is not the only way way to recover genetic information, proteins are chains of amino acids, which are produced from RNA which is produced from DNA. Ergo, if you have remnants of proteins you should be kind of able to work back to a source DNA sequence from that even if the source DNA itself is nowhere to be had. And if you have deduced source DNA you could have
  • I'm not afraid of them creating a dinosaur; but I am afraid they will find an interesting sequence and insert it into something or other and then - ooopsie - drop the test tube. Of course, they would then buy a rug and sweep the shards under it.
  • ... for nothing will unite humanity more than ppl being chased by packs of angry t-rexes. 10/10

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ErstO ( 1696262 )
      But what if they find the keys that tie all life on earth together, and they discover Humans don't fit in
  • in brussels wetstraat ... evidence has been found there's a correlation in reaction speed between the security council and brontosaurs

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