Photo: Centrosaurus skull, by Sainterx, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The recent discovery of a full, well-preserved baby mammoth was greeted with sighs:
She is more than 30,000 years old and yet her preservation is astonishing: she has her skin, her tiny tusks, her toenails and her tiny tail. She still has tufts of fur, and her trunk – with its grasping tip – is complete and malleable. Looking at the original photo from where she was found in a Yukon gold mine, it looks like she only recently died.
JAN TIMMONS, “‘BLOW’ AS SCIENTISTS UNCOVER BABY WOOLLY MAMMOTH STOCKED” IN GIZMODO (JULY 2, 2022)
It’s easy to see why:
And the find naturally renews questions about the resurrection of much, much older extinct life forms through recovered DNA. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea: is it possible? A recent article in The Guardian notes that as we dig up more and more fossils, we’re finding things we’ve been told not to expect:
What Alida Bailleul saw through the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of a fossilized skull of a young hadrosaur, a duckbill, plant-eating beast that roamed present-day Montana 75 million years ago, when she noticed features that made her gasp.
Bailleul was inspecting fossils from a collection at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, to understand how dinosaur skulls evolved. But what caught her eye was not, as the textbooks said, supposed to be there. Embedded in calcified cartilage at the back of the skull were what appeared to be petrified cells. Some contained small structures that looked like nuclei. In one was what looked like a stack of chromosomes, the strands that carry an organism’s DNA.
IAN SAMPLE, LIFE WILL FIND A WAY: CAN SCIENTISTS MAKE JURASSIC PARK A REALITY?, THE GUARDIAN (21 JUN 2022)
Paper bomb
Bailleul showed his specimens to Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist whose doctoral student was Jack Horner, the inspiration for Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. She herself experienced much criticism for her claim to have found soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. The two teamed up, gathered evidence and laid it out in a “bombshell” open-access paper in Oxford’s National Science Review in 2020.
Badly preserved
Schweitzer doesn’t claim to have “found dinosaur DNA” because the evidence is still inconclusive.
The problem is that the surviving DNA will be very poorly preserved after so many millions of years. And even then:
The question is whether these proteins and other traces are really what they seem. On the heels of Bailleul’s paper—and inspired by the controversy over what biomolecules are in dinosaur bones—a separate team led by Princeton University geoscientist Renxing Liang recently reported unexpected microbes found inside one of Centrosaurus, a horned dinosaur with similar age to Hypacrosaurus. The researchers said they found DNA inside the bone, but it was from lines of bacteria and other microorganisms that had not been seen before. The bone has its own unique microbiome, which can cause confusion as to whether the proteins and possible genetic material belong to the dinosaur itself or to bacteria that took up residence in it during the fossilization process.
RILEY BLACK, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN’S “DINOSAUR DNA DISCOVERED?” (APRIL 17, 2020)
However, an apparent finding of DNA from an insect 130 million years ago was part of the Jurassic Park hype when it was first discussed more than thirty years ago.
Read the rest in Mind Matters News, published by the Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
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