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posted by on Thursday February 02 2017, @07:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-in-time-for-jurassic-park's-grand-opening dept.

Two teams of scientists claim to have found proteins in ancient dinosaur bone fossils:

One study, led by Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist from North Carolina State University in Raleigh who has chased dinosaur proteins for de­cades, confirms her highly controversial claim to have recovered 80-million-year-old dinosaur collagen. The other paper suggests that protein may even have sur­vived in a 195-million-year-old dino fossil. The Schweitzer paper is a "milestone," says ancient protein expert Enrico Cap­pellini of the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark, who was skeptical of some of Schweitzer's ear­lier work. "I'm fully convinced beyond a reasonable doubt the evidence is authen­tic." He calls the second study "a long shot that is suggestive." But together, Cappellini and others argue, the papers have the po­tential to transform dinosaur paleontology into a molecular science, much as analyz­ing ancient DNA has revolutionized the study of human evolution.

[...] The second paper, published this week in Nature Communications, goes back even fur­ther in time but offers weaker evidence, Cap­pellini says. In this work, researchers led by paleontologist Robert Reisz at the University of Toronto in Canada reported finding what they believe is collagen in a 195-million-year-old fossil rib from a large plant-eating dino­saur called Lufengosaurus that lived in what is now southwestern China. Reisz says his team's methods, called Raman spectroscopy and synchrotron radiation Fourier trans­form infrared microspectroscopy (SR-FTIR), can probe the chemical makeup of a sample without the need to purify it first, which low­ers the risk of contamination. The rib, he and his colleagues report, absorbed infrared light in wavelengths that match those of collagen from mod­ern animals.

Also at BBC.

Previous scientific papers about protein in fossils:

Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein (DOI: 10.1126/science.1138709) (DX)

'Protein' in 80-Million-Year-Old Fossil Bolsters Controversial T. rex Claim (DOI: 10.1126/science.324_578) (DX)

Protein power (DOI: 10.1126/science.349.6246.372) (DX)

This week's papers:

Expansion for the Brachylophosaurus canadensis Collagen I Sequence and Additional Evidence of the Preservation of Cretaceous Protein (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.6b00873) (DX)

Evidence of preserved collagen in an Early Jurassic sauropodomorph dinosaur revealed by synchrotron FTIR microspectroscopy (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14220) (DX)


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