from the Colonel-mustard-in-the-kitchen-with-the-lead-pipe dept.
Seemingly Ordinary Fossils May Be Hiding Some Major Clues to the Past:
Paleontologists are lucky to find complete sets of fossilized bones. Sometimes, they get even luckier, finding preserved impressions of delicate features like feathers. Beyond those clues, though, most of the biology of extinct species—their DNA, internal organs, and unique chemistry—has been totally destroyed by the many millions of years that separate us. Except, what if it hasn't? Some scientists now claim they can tease much more complex biological information out of apparently mundane fossils, including things that most paleontologists don't expect to survive over millions of years, such as skin and eggshell.
Molecular paleobiologist Jasmina Wiemann has been on the forefront of this exciting research since 2018, co-authoring papers that reveal elements of fossils that cannot be immediately seen with our eyes but can be detected through a series of complex chemical and statistical analyses. Her recent paper, published this summer with Jason Crawford and Derek Briggs, builds upon other, similar research from the past two years. She and her co-authors claim they can determine the chemical signatures of skin, bone, teeth, and eggshell. Even better, they can train anyone else in the field within approximately 20 minutes to find these ancient traces using their techniques. It's an opportunity they hope will be widely used within museum collections the world over.
Consider that most museums only display a small percentage of the fossils they have in their collection. Those fossils chosen for display are either partially complete skeletons or fossils that are readily recognizable to the general public. What remains in many collections' storage rooms are shelves upon shelves of the rest: the less-flashy fossils that nonetheless offer insight into ancient life. What if they all could be tested for hidden biomarkers? Fossilized dinosaur cells, blood vessel, and bone matrix.
[...] In other words, rather than search for a specific molecule on one particular fossil, they wanted to determine what molecules—if any—were on the sample set of fossils they explored. What they consistently discovered was that traces of certain ancient molecules survived, chemically altered but still distinct. The team could identify different types of molecular fossils, and they could interpret their biological meaning.
[...] Wiemann brings a different perspective to paleontology. At the age of 15, she won a scholarship in Germany to study chemistry, which enabled her to complete degrees in geosciences and evolutionary biology before attending Yale University, where she is currently a PhD candidate. In the past two years, she has discovered egg color in dinosaurs, contributed to research offering further evidence that the Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum) is a vertebrate, and helped reveal evidence that soft-shelled eggs evolved in dinosaurs before calcified eggshells. Translating the ancient chemical properties associated with those fossils was her role. As she explained, "I develop molecular proxies for all kinds of evolutionary topics to unlock information otherwise inaccessible to paleontologists."
Journal References:
1.) Victoria E. McCoy, Jasmina Wiemann, James C. Lamsdell, et al. Chemical signatures of soft tissues distinguish between vertebrates and invertebrates from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek Lagerstätte of Illinois, Geobiology (DOI: 10.1111/gbi.12397)
2.) Aude Cincotta, Thanh Thuy Nguyen Tu, Julien L. Colaux, et al. Chemical preservation of tail feathers from Anchiornis huxleyi, a theropod dinosaur from the Tiaojishan Formation (Upper Jurassic, China), Palaeontology (DOI: 10.1111/pala.12494)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:38AM
While I doubt the original material remains, the original material may have been able to transform the preservation process in various ways that may be detectable. It's sort of like studying a shadow: even though you can't see the real thing, you can still infer a lot. Experience is gained over time to interpret after-effects properly.