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Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells (sciencemag.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the ancient-eggs dept.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700,000-year-old horse in Canada's Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia...extinct horses, rhinos, and deer,
This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?

12 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Should we? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I don't think "Should we?" is the question that will be the decision point. The decision point will be "Will it make money?" And the long term answer to that is Jurassic World, but one where the people don't get eaten.

    1. Re:Should we? by Joce640k · · Score: 2

      I don't get that people can think scientists are evil for resurrecting things but that other people aren't bad for wiping them out, destroying their habitats. etc.

      --
      No sig today...
  2. Of course! by drunken_boxer777 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why would we pass up a chance to learn? Scientists from all branches of science learn by tinkering, and this would be another form, even if we only did it to validate our understanding (once sufficiently advanced) of how DNA sequences yield a very specific body pattern and size and set of behaviors.

    Besides, most people forget that the environment the dinosaurs lived in was very different from ours, both in temperature/climate and air composition, making it a much more difficult problem than "can we clone them?". For example, prehistoric insects were very large, larger than what the current oxygen levels in our atmosphere could support since they don't have lungs and breathe basically via diffusion. So, for specific values of "prehistoric" the difficulties involve artificial environments.

    1. Re:Of course! by RockDoctor · · Score: 2
      You are conflating two different times. While the (non-avian, see signature) dinosaurs were around, oxygen levels were within a few percent of our present atmospheric levels, though CO2 was at times considerably higher. Over 100 million years earlier however, in the Carboniferous period (Pennsylvanian/ Mississippian if you speak EN_US), the first insects were sometimes much larger than present insects and oxygen levels were up to about 30%.

      Personally, I blame the fungi. When they learned how to decompose lignin (the stuff that makes wood tough), the accumulations of undecomposed land-plant debris got digested back into carbon dioxide (which went into limestone) and absorbed a large amount of the oxygen. This change in the carbon cycle had measurable effects in the stable-isotope carbon composition of the oceans, which we can see in authigenic minerals in marine sediments.

      But those two atmospheres were further apart in time than we are from the last of the ammonites, or the Chixulub impactor.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  3. Of course we should clone them! by Black+Parrot · · Score: 3, Funny

    We'll need dinosaurs to help us fight our robots when they decide to subjugate us.

    p.s. - I got dibs on the movie rights.

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  4. yes we should by Kkloe · · Score: 2

    and spare no expense

  5. What we should really do. by darthsilun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?

    Perhaps we could focus on saving the fauna we have now that is on the verge of going extinct from a variety of reasons. E.g. the African megafauna that is being poached and other species whose habitat is disappearing.

    What do you think?

    1. Re:What we should really do. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Funny

      Hell, if elephant ivory is good for an aphrodisiac, the MAMMOTH ivory should give you an even bigger erection. A mammoth one even.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:What we should really do. by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 2

      Perhaps we could focus on saving the fauna we have now that is on the verge of going extinct from a variety of reasons.

      I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

      If any extinct species deserves a second chance it should be mammoths. They only went extinct because we arrived as an invasive species and killed them all ourselves.

  6. Keep dreaming by minkwe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know how the reporter thinks this discovery could ever lead to cloning of such an organism. A typical eukaryote has 20,000 to 100,000 proteins in its proteome. Even viruses could have hundreds of proteins. To clone an organism, you will need to have a full copy of its DNA (or RNA in the case of RNA viruses). That means prestine samples of all proteins from the proteome. Even having that is not enough, since going from proteins to DNA is not straightforward -- since proteins are often modified after translation. Even then, you also need non-protein encoding DNA which is just as important for the survival of the organism.

    I would say it is a pipe dream to start thinking of cloning, based on finding a fragment of a pre-historic protein. Rather than speculate about cloning, there are a lot of other very useful questions this discovery can answer, such as how that protein has evolved with respect similar proteins modern variants of the same species. We could perhaps then understand what micro-evolutionary pressures could have influenced (or not influenced) the evolution of a species such as an ostrich which has survived all these years.

    --
    "Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
  7. No It Doesn't by careysub · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?"

    This find raises no such question. Proteins have nothing to do with cloning.

    For that you need DNA. We can reconstruct genomes of some ancient animals, that died within the last few tens of thousands of years and were preserved in frozen strata. Clever reconstructions are necessary to put the fragments back together, but still here are usually errors and gaps that must be filled in with modern related organisms. Older DNA is probably hopeless for organism reconstruction, though the fragments can be used for taxonomic work.

    --
    Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
  8. Clone? From proteins? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This raises the inevitable question: Do Slashdot editors even understand the articles they submit?