10,000 Year Old Dinosaur Dna?

[lonelee]

During an Easter supper with my family, my father pointed out that scientists found the remains of a dinosaur which was within 10,000 years old proving Dinosaurs are not as old as once thought. To further his claim, he said the news went on to say there was DNA still detected in the bones. I've never heard of this, but thought I'd ask whether or not anyone else has heard of this.

[lonelee]

Oh, the dinosaur fossil was discovered in Australia, by the way.

[Ouroboros]

During an Easter supper with my family, my father pointed out that scientists found the remains of a dinosaur which was within 10,000 years old proving Dinosaurs are not as old as once thought. To further his claim, he said the news went on to say there was DNA still detected in the bones. I've never heard of this, but thought I'd ask whether or not anyone else has heard of this.

Actually, the dinosaurs never really left Earth. You can get dinosaur DNA today.

 

Birds are supposedly descendants to the dinos, so 10,000 year old DNA is not impressive when we can get just one day old DNA.

[Petrel]

Sounds like he heard part of several news stories and got them confused. We've found collagen fragments in 67 million year old dinosaur fossils, it shares great sequence homology with chicken collagen, since dinosaurs and birds are related. We've found DNA in younger fossils of other animals, potentially what he's thinking of is a mammoth that scientists managed to sequence mitochondrial DNA from. We have no dinosaur DNA since it's not as tough as protein and doesn't appear capable of lasting more than a few tens of thousands of years.

 

Edit: I'm certain he's mistaken because any credible discovery of dinosaur fossils less than 65 million years old would be a ZOMG WTF discovery that would result in controversy and commentaries plastered across all of the major science journals.

[oddbird1963]

I have a theory. And based on that theory, I am going to make a prediction: Your dad was repeating bullshit!

 

He might have heard the news about the 4th species of early hominids discovered recently and confused the details.

 

From a news article:

 

DNA from a 40,000-year-old pinkie finger, belonging to a child and found in the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, indicates that the bone is from a previously unknown family of human relatives that lived among Neanderthals and modern humans . . .

 

The new species shared a common ancestor with modern humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago, based on the DNA sequences, according to the team led by anthropologists Johannes Krause and Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

 

Of course, this is nothing about a dinosaur, but it is the most recent DNA news I know of related to evolution.

 

I did find an old 2001 news group article that talked about 10000 pieces of Jordanian amber dated 140,000,000 years ago that scientists hoped to extract dna from.

 

Did you happen to ask your dad the network and news show he saw this on? It wasn't a 700 Club, TBN or some other fundamentalist "ministry" broadcast was it?

[★ Citsonga ★]

I have a theory. And based on that theory, I am going to make a prediction: Your dad was repeating bullshit!

 

He might have heard the news about the 4th species of early hominids discovered recently and confused the details.

 

I agree that there's a good chance he was repeating bullshit, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he confused the details. He may have been repeating something from some bullshit creationist publication.

[hereticzero]

There was a day when chickens lost their lips. That could be the 10,000 year old dinosaur of reference. We are not sure when the chicken lost its lips, perhaps around the same time as when snakes lost the ability to speak?

[lonelee]

I'm thinking he was either confused about his facts, or he was repeating a bunch of BS. He's sincere enough, but does often hear only the parts he wants to hear.

[Thurisaz]

Chance that daddy really just repeated the bullshit of some babblical cretinist: 99.999345 %

 

[★ Citsonga ★]

Chance that daddy really just repeated the bullshit of some babblical cretinist: 99.999345 %

 

 

I think you need a few more "9"s in there.

[OpheliaGinger]

I had a moment of retard thinking, "They found dino DNA!?" until you pointed out 10,000 years.

[scitsofreaky]

I had a moment of retard thinking, "They found dino DNA!?" until you pointed out 10,000 years.

I had the same reaction. How would they get DNA from fossilized bone? I may be mistaken, but I would think that the process of fossilization would preclude any such discovery, or at least make it nearly impossible.

[lonelee]

I think I may have found what my father was talking about. Here's the link...Not sure what to make of it yet. LINK

[Petrel]

That's the 67 million year old fossil I mentioned that they were able to recover collagen from. It was cool because when they demineralized the fossil they could find tiny scraps of residual material that was actually flexible, and what appear to be remnants of cells. However, the analysis of these has not been published. Flexible fossils have been discovered before, but the original organic material has been degraded and replaced. It's likely this extraordinary preservation is just morphological and little of the original biomolecules remain. There hasn't been anything published on this since the collagen data a couple years ago now.

 

They were able to sequence collagen from this fossil, but that doesn't mean that intact protein was there--in fact it was badly degraded. The only reason they were able to get a usable sequence out of it is because there is so much collagen in tissues, so even though the collagen molecules were badly degraded they were able to sequence short peptide remnants from many different molecules and then overlap the sequences like putting together a jigsaw puzzle to find that the sequence for T. rex collagen is much like that of bird collagen.

[Shyone]

I think I may have found what my father was talking about. Here's the link...Not sure what to make of it yet. LINK

Very interesting. There are several things that this may indicate, but none would really support Creationism except in their twisted little world.

 

1. Dating of fossilized bones is multifaceted, and the combination of sedentary rock dating, stratigraphy and the like are still valid.

2. It hasn't been possible to date the carbon components of the bone yet, and probably won't be since carbon 14 dating only extends back a few thousand years.

3. It hasn't been possible to sequence the proteinaceous material yet, so the assumption that this is the original organic material from the animals may be proven false.

4. They haven't found DNA yet (or sequenced it).

5. The immunologic study suggests that this animal is related to rats and/or some kind of bird, and that flies in the face of Creationism. T-Rex is a lot different from any birds living today. A totally different genus.

 

What this does suggest is that our ideas of fossilizatin as the complete replacement of all organic components of the fossilized animals may not be correct. No one has ever "demineralized" a fossil because no one every thought they were made of anything but minerals. The very idea would have seemed silly, but it was a brilliant advance in paleontology that may reveal tremendous amounts of information about ancient creatures if this does turn out to be organic material from ancient animals.

 

We should never fear to look into the unusual things that science reveals. It can only enhance our knowledge, even with the peanut gallery of Creationists making absurd remarks about this.

 

Incidentally, the time scale for fossilization is still the same, and mineralization takes at least 10,000 years. It is not useful to consider that older fossils are necessarily different from younger fossils once the process is complete, so fossilization is not used for dating of fossils (other than to say they are older than about 10,000 years).

 

IOW, if there are organic materials within the fossil, then bring it on.

[Shyone]

 

They were able to sequence collagen from this fossil, but that doesn't mean that intact protein was there--in fact it was badly degraded. The only reason they were able to get a usable sequence out of it is because there is so much collagen in tissues, so even though the collagen molecules were badly degraded they were able to sequence short peptide remnants from many different molecules and then overlap the sequences like putting together a jigsaw puzzle to find that the sequence for T. rex collagen is much like that of bird collagen.

I didn't see anything in the article about sequencing of the collagen. They used immunological techniques, but I saw nothing about the sequencing.

 

Is there another article you are referring to that speaks about the sequencing of the collagenous material they found?

[Petrel]

Yeah, a follow-up paper in Science in 2007. They had a similar one in 2009 on a hadrosaur fossil, but nothing more on the chemical analysis of the T. rex.

 

Edit: Also a 2008 paper on phylogenetics based on the recovered protein sequences.

 

If I had that many articles in high-caliber journals in that time frame I'd probably die of bliss. Maybe the bickering kicked off by the initial paper (see the related articles and citing articles) helped counteract that!

[Shyone]

Yeah, a follow-up paper in Science in 2007. They had a similar one in 2009 on a hadrosaur fossil, but nothing more on the chemical analysis of the T. rex.

 

Edit: Also a 2008 paper on phylogenetics based on the recovered protein sequences.

 

If I had that many articles in high-caliber journals in that time frame I'd probably die of bliss. Maybe the bickering kicked off by the initial paper (see the related articles and citing articles) helped counteract that!

So what are your thoughts about the significance of the finding that there can be collagen or other proteinaceous material in fossils? How does that change our thinking of fossils or fossilization?

 

Do you agree with my assessments about dating fossils, or do you think that this might actually change the way paleontologists consider fossil dates?

 

Just how much smoke are the Creationists blowing up the collective asses of paleontologists, and have you heard any refutation of the Creationists claims about the "catastrophic" theory of fossilization?

[Guest Babylonian Dream]

They found dino DNA and brought back the dinosaurs! O wait, no, that was Jurassic Park.

 

He was probably just repeating nonsense. Probably got it in an email, one of those emails that float around. Like the one my mother sent me of Obama being Osama Bin Laden's 4rth cousin. It's all junk.

 

Though as others have said about birds, and even if you point out crocagators, we do still have some dinosaurs technically. though they're just descended from them and aren't dinosaurs.

[Petrel]

So what are your thoughts about the significance of the finding that there can be collagen or other proteinaceous material in fossils? How does that change our thinking of fossils or fossilization?

 

Do you agree with my assessments about dating fossils, or do you think that this might actually change the way paleontologists consider fossil dates?

 

Just how much smoke are the Creationists blowing up the collective asses of paleontologists, and have you heard any refutation of the Creationists claims about the "catastrophic" theory of fossilization?

It's significant because it opens a new avenue for research to find out more about extinct species. Regarding fossilization, it tells us that protein can survive longer than anticipated under the right conditions. That's not my area of expertise so I couldn't say much more.

 

There are so many variables going into it that I don't see how it's possible for this to prove useful in dating fossils. Radioactive decay occurs at a constant rate, but chemical degradation depends upon temperature, pH, humidity. . . I'm confident in the accuracy of our dating methods, so this won't change anything.

 

I believe the general approach paleontologists take to creationists is to ignore them. Most of the response to creationists is done by those interested in the topic who take it up as a hobby. There has been some response to creationist claims regarding this particular discovery. I, for one, sent Answers in Genesis a long letter--with endnotes--correcting their coverage of the story. Never heard anything back, of course (and since then they've capped their comments form at something like 250 words. . .)

 

One of the most obvious responses to creationist claims suggesting this find means dinosaur fossils are 4000 years old like all the other fossils is to ask if that is so, why can't we not recover DNA from them when it's pretty trivial to recover DNA from other fossils 10,000 years old? Why is it so much harder (often impossible, people have tried isolating protein from dinosaur fossils before) to obtain protein from dinosaur fossils (dated >65 million years) than more recent fossils? The mastodon fossil they studied was 100k-600k years old, but the sequence coverage obtained for collagen was similar to that obtained from modern ostrich bone. But obtaining useful peptide solutions from the T. rex fossil was like yanking teeth (7 peptides compared to 74 for the mastodon fossil). If all fossils are 4000 years old, we should be able to isolate biomolecules from all of them with equal ease.

 

I found both of those Science articles are available in full text with free registration at their site, by the way.

[lonelee]

I believe the general approach paleontologists take to creationists is to ignore them. Most of the response to creationists is done by those interested in the topic who take it up as a hobby. There has been some response to creationist claims regarding this particular discovery. I, for one, sent Answers in Genesis a long letter--with endnotes--correcting their coverage of the story. Never heard anything back, of course (and since then they've capped their comments form at something like 250 words. . .)

When did you contact Answers In Genesis? If recently, please keep us updated! Sounds interesting. This whole thing reminds me of the meteoric dust issue on the moon. When man was to first land on the moon, scientists expected several inches (maybe even feet, I don't remember) of this dust to be covering the moon. When they discovered there were only a few inches, creationists were all over it, claiming the moon was much younger than mainstream scientists had predicted. But after re-doing the math, the number came back to show the low level of dust actually did fit the 4 billion years predicted. I'm not sure if the mainstream scientists just tried to make the numbers fit, or if they actually saw a legitimate error and corrected it.

[Petrel]

It was going on three years now, when these papers first came out. Here was their response:

 

*crickets*

[Shyone]

I found both of those Science articles are available in full text with free registration at their site, by the way.

I really should register...

[Petrel]

Yes, why not? It's Science!