Photo: Skull of Centrosaurus, by Sainterx, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The recent finding of a complete and well-preserved mammoth baby was greeted with moans:
It is over 30,000 years old and yet its preservation is amazing: it has its skin, its small tusks, its toenails and its small tail. It still has flakes of skin and its trunk, with its prehensile tip, is complete and malleable. Looking at the initial photograph from where she was found at a Yukon gold mine, it looks like she recently learned of her death.
JEANNE TIMMONS, “‘GASPS’ COM SENSEAL Scientists REVEAL PRESERVED BABY WOOLLY MAMMOTH” IN GIZMODO (JULY 2, 2022)
It’s easy to see why:
And the finding naturally renews questions about resurrecting much, much older extinct life forms using 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 discover things we were told we weren’t expecting:
What Alida Bailleul saw under the microscope made no sense. She was examining thin sections of the fossilized skull of a young hadrosaurus, a duckbill and plant-eating beast that roamed what is now Montana 75 million years ago, when it saw features that made it breathe.
Bailleul was inspecting the fossils, from a collection at the Rocky Mountain Museum in Bozeman, Montana, to understand how dinosaur skulls developed. But what caught his eye shouldn’t be there, according to the textbooks. Embedded in the calcified cartilage at the back of the skull was what appeared to be fossilized cells. Some contained tiny structures that resembled nuclei. In one was what looked like a group of chromosomes, the threads that carry the DNA of an organism.
IAN SAMPLE, “LIFE WILL FIND A WAY: COULD SCIENTISTS MAKE JURASSIC PARK A REALITY?” AL GUARDIAN (JUNE 21, 2022)
A bomb paper
Bailleul showed his specimens to Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist whose doctoral supervisor had been Jack Horner, the inspiration for Alan Grant at Jurassic Park. She herself had survived much criticism for her claim that she had found soft tissue in dinosaur fossils. The two joined forces, collected evidence and presented it in a “bomb” open access document to the Oxford National Science Review in 2020.
Poorly preserved
Schweitzer does not claim he “found dinosaur DNA” because the evidence is still uncertain.
The problem is that surviving DNA would 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. Following Bailleul’s article, and inspired by the controversy over what biomolecules represent within dinosaur bones, a separate team, led by Princeton University geoscientist Renxing Liang, recently reported on unexpected microbes found inside a dinosaur. of Centrosaurus, a dinosaur with similar horns. age to Hypacrosaurus. The researchers said they unearthed DNA inside the bone, but it was from lineages of bacteria and other microorganisms that had not been seen before. The bone had its own unique microbiome, which could cause confusion as to whether the proteins and possible genetic material belonged to the dinosaur itself or to the bacteria that had resided there during the fossilization process.
RILEY BLACK, “THE DNA OF THE DISCOVERED DINOSAUR?” A SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (APRIL 17, 2020)
That said, an apparent DNA find of an insect 130 million years ago was part of the buzz around Jurassic Park when it was first posed more than thirty years ago.
Read the rest in Mind Matters News, published by the Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at the Discovery Institute.