Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found

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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