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Nationalgeographic.co.id—In a study report published last month (September 24, 2021) in the journal Communications Biology, a group of researchers claim to have extracted molecules from dinosaur fossils. This molecule they believe has the potential to contain the oldest DNA in the world because it comes from a 125 million-year-old dinosaur fossil.
By far, the oldest animal DNA ever found belongs to a one-million-year-old woolly mammoth. DNA is a relatively fragile molecule, and dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. So so far the idea of getting DNA from dinosaurs is something more science fiction.
In a study report in Communications Biology In this study, paleontologists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature extracted and declassified thigh cartilage from the 125-million-year-old dinosaur Caudipteryx. This dinosaur lived in the Jehol Biota during the Early Cretaceous period. Jehol Biota is an area that is now part of the coastal province of Liaoning in northeastern China.
According to a news release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the femur cells contained preserved cell nuclei and chromatin fragments that could potentially store the dinosaur’s DNA. The scientists obtained this material by staining the extracted cells with hematoxylin, a chemical capable of binding to cell nuclei.
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The research team then compared the staining of Caudipteryx cartilage with chicken cartilage samples. They noted that the staining of the fossil resembled the cell nuclei and chromatin of chicken cells.
“The preservation of the fossils at Jehol Biota is remarkable because of the fine volcanic ash that buried the carcass and preserved it down to the cellular level,” said Li Zhiheng of IVPP, one of the authors of the study report. The Scientist.
The study report paper also showed that these components of the cell nucleus were preserved more effectively in fossil cartilage tissue than other tissue types.
However, a number of other scientists voiced the need for caution or skepticism about the findings. Evan Saitta, a researcher with Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, told Gizmodo that the microbes in the fossils could be mistaken for the genetic material of the dinosaurs themselves.
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Love Dalén, a paleogeneticist from the Center for Paleogenetics in Sweden who was part of the team that extracted millions of years old mammoth DNA, shares the same opinion. He called the idea of DNA surviving in dinosaurs remaining nearly “impossible.”
“We know from massive empirical studies and theoretical models that even under completely frozen conditions, DNA molecules will not last more than about 3 million years,” Dalén said. Gizmodo.
Sergio Bertazzo, a biochemist from University College London who was also not involved in the new study, told Chemistry World that more analysis is needed to support the conclusions of the study. “They need to use other chemical/biochemical techniques, [seperti] mass spectrometry or any other method that can confirm the chemical identity of what they’re coloring,” Bertazzo suggested.
The research team also acknowledges that more work needs to be done in the future to accurately identify the biomolecules of Caudipteryx’s femur. Alida Bailleul, a paleontologist and research fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences involved in the new study, told Chemistry World, “The nuclei of these dinosaur cells are colored like normal cells, but does that mean there is DNA in them? Not really.”
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Bailleul called this stain “a good start” but “not precise enough to show whether a particular compound is present.”
In the news release, Bailleul further said that “We have good preliminary data, very interesting data, but we are just starting to study cellular biochemistry in fossil very old. At this point, we need to work more.”
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