A Fossilized Blood-Engorged Mosquito Is Found for the First Time Ever (2013) | Hacker News Reader

A Fossilized Blood-Engorged Mosquito Is Found for the First Time Ever (2013)

smithsonianmag.com

112 pointsareoform66 comments

It's an Eocene mosquito. Dinosaurs were already extinct. Notable about this period is it was the last time there was no ice at the poles and water covered a lot more of the earth, as you can see from the map of the Eocene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene which means there were probably a lot of blood-filled mosquitos around during the Eocene.

Also from the article: DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood.

> Also from the article: DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood.

Does this mean that the oldest creature that can be “restored” should be dead for less than 521 years old?

The article they cite says this might not apply in caves or permafrost for example. It gives ~1.5 million years as an endpoint for readability

Yeah we've sampled a full horse genome from 700,000 years ago.

It means that half the DNA is gone after 521 years. After another 521 years, half of the remaining DNA is gone too, leaving 1/4 of the original DNA.

Figure that rate of decay into your "restoration" technique to know for how long an organism can be "restored" after being dead. Does your technique require 100% of the DNA? Better catch them on asphalt. Is 50% good enough? You could probably restore Newton. You could do Paul with 6% give or take.

I don't think that analysis is right. From the original Royal Society paper:

> The average DNA half-life within this geographically constrained fossil assemblage was estimated to be 521 years for a 242 bp mtDNA sequence, corresponding to a per nucleotide fragmentation rate (k) of 5.50 × 10–6 per year.

If there is a 50% chance that a 242 base pair sequence has a break in 500 years, you will be able to recover the full sequence in way more than 50% of 500 year old samples. First, you have many copies of the same DNA fragment in a macroscopic drop of blood, so some will not have a break. Second, even if it's older and all strands have at least one break, you can look at a bunch of half strands or tenth strands and infer the complete sequence. Likewise, if I had a thousand copies of a book where each copy had a few destroyed pages, it would not be hard to reconstitute the entire contents of the books.

I think the above rate of decay would allow for recovery of the sequence in a sample after probably tens of thousands of years. This is why mammoths, but not dinosaurs, are typically the targets for brining back extinct mammals.

Interesting perspective, thank you. I'd like to see the comments of somebody versed in the field.

It's interesting that North America is actually less covered in water on that map than it is now. No Hudson Bay, no Great Lakes. Looks like the arctic archipelago is more unified than now, but that's harder to tell.

I just don’t know if I can truly believe that dna half life number. What dna molecule type in what condition ? What temperature? What does a long dna strand degrade into? Citations will be appreciated.

Nature

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555

Scientific American

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dinos-dna-demise-...

The Royal Society

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...

Scitech Daily

https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-calculate-that-dna-has-...

Thanks. Looks like the royal society link is the original work, but the nature editorial also mentions the same - it’s still possible we might have higher stability in other conditions (they only loooked at dna in bone samples). Not saying we will hold hope for dinosaur cloning, just that 521 years sounds too small.

DNA is stable, but still susceptible to hydrolysis. Water will eventually degrade it down to constitutive parts.

How about in amber then? How long might we expect DNA to remain intact perfectly encased in amber?

You won't find DNA that isn't in contact with a lot of water in nature, unless something actively extract the water.

The questions still seems reasonable? Maybe there exists some geological processes minerals deposits that absorbed moisture? Some kind of geothermal heating (although maybe that would just make steam permeate the surrounding area), an asteroid fragment from the Chicxulub impact that carried DNA into space??

Amber is heterogeneous in composition, but consists of several resinous bodies more or less soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, associated with an insoluble bituminous substance. Amber is a macromolecule by free radical polymerization of several precursors in the labdane family, e.g. communic acid, cummunol, and biformene. These labdanes are diterpenes (C20H32) and trienes, equipping the organic skeleton with three alkene groups for polymerization. As amber matures over the years, more polymerization takes place as well as isomerization reactions, crosslinking and cyclization.

Wikipedia Amber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber

CAN YOU REALLY PULL A "JURASSIC PARK" AND EXTRACT DNA FROM BUGS FROZEN IN AMBER?

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/can-you-really-extract-dna-fr...

I love the way that map shows all the nations of our currently familiar final map all flooded and out of place... Except Ireland and Britain. Those are really the old country!

And yet they keep "restoring" parts of ancient DNA from fossilized bones for further analysis. Who knows what's possible in the future, maybe they'll use frogs to fill in the blanks or something. ;)

When the bones have turned to stone there's not much to restore as the stone/minerals essentially just fill the empty shape that the body left behind. I think they can do some minor analysis still, like e.g. pigment analysis to identify possible colors. But if its just 'very old bones' you can still get DNA fragments. The chance of getting a whole strand of DNA is however pretty low. So you might be able to identify relations, but you wouldn't be able to clone them.

If you're talking about woolly mammoth DNA [0], that's around 10,000 years old.

This mosquito is around 50 million years old. The DNA in its belly is too degraded. Restoration ain't gonna happen.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/14/1036884561/dna-resurrection-j...

You, sir, ruined my dreams in an instant.

Damn I want dinosaurs!

> DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood.

That's true but there might be some fragments left.

You have billions of identical copies of the DNA molecules probably, so it might matter less if there are some breaks or errors when you sequence, if you sequence very thoroughly.. even when sequencing fresh DNA you have lots of read errors, inserts and deletes.. (haven't read the specifics of this case but I'm sure the fidelity numbers are in the articles somewhere, would be interesting!)

It's amazing to think of how alien the Earth has been in the past. I think we humans tend to fall victim to this idea that the world we first experienced is how things "are" or "should be" when in reality there's no baseline at all. The EArth has been frozen to the equator (~500M years ago). Sea levels have been higher. They've also been significantly lower and quite recently too (eg there are Neolithic artifacts in the English Channel because that was a land bridge 10-50,000 years ago).

My favourite example: for the first 60M years of trees existing, there were no organisms to digest the wood of dead trees. They just sat there or maybe burned. This is where 95% of the coal comes from.

I'd really give anything to see some of these periods all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion, which had some truly alien-looking life based on fossil records.

It's also why I'm skeptical about doom and gloom predictions of runaway climate change. To be clear, I'm a firm believer that human activity has played and will continue to play a huge part in climate change. This also may be really bad for us. But the Earth will (ultimately) be fine. Something like 99% of the species that have ever existed are extinct now and this will continue to happen with or without human involvement.

The article points out that DNA degrades quickly (~500 year half life). That doesn't mean it can't survive for millions of years. It just means very little of it does. Also environmental factors come into play (eg it would probably survive longer in Antarctica, for example). Still, recovering a complete genome from such fragments is all but impossible (also mentioned).

Anyway, It's kind of amazing to think that a mosquito bit some creature ~46M years ago and a fossil of it somehow survived until today.

While you correctly pointed out that human activity is contributing to climate change. You forgot to mention how unprecedented the rate at which the climate is changing. A process that normally takes tens of thousands of years is happening within a 3-4 human lifetimes. Far too quickly for organisms to adapt.

“Doom & gloom” is a defined differently to many people. What exactly do you mean here? Are humans going extinct & Earth is going to become uninhabitable? I certainly don’t think so.

Again, to reiterate: I'm not denying human impact on climate change. Let's just get that out of the way.

But your claim about rate of change, which is often repeated, is actually wrong [1]:

> Unlike the relatively stable climate Earth has experienced over the last 10,000 years, Earth's climate system underwent a series of abrupt oscillations and reorganizations during the last ice age between 18,000 and 80,000 years ago ... There are twenty-five of these distinct warming-cooling oscillations (Dansgaard 1984) which are now commonly referred to as Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles, or D-O cycles. One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C (Huber et al. 2006). Furthermore, the cooling occurred much more gradually, giving these events a saw-tooth shape in climate records from most of the Northern Hemisphere (Figure 1).

[1]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...

Regardless of whether or not high rates of change happened in the past, they're not good for stability of life. That 10,000 years of stability was crucial to the evolution of our species and most food we eat (wheat being a huge example). So I don't think you can shrug it off and say "pah, this all happened before". So did WWII, and I wouldn't like to repeat it just because.

We're looking at mass extinctions, loss of whole ecosystems, more wildfires, more storms. Not good things. Worse if you do it to yourself.

We're looking at mass extinctions either way. The holocene extinction started before anthropogenic climate change began and will continue even after we restabilize the climate. There's a lot more we'll have to do if we want to protect our remaining wildlife.

> Regardless of whether or not high rates of change happened in the past, they're not good for stability of life.

Let the moving goalposts begin.

If the last 10,000 years of relative climate stability is unusual--and it seems to be at least within the context of the last 100,000 years--then how can you argue it's "bad for life"?

This is the point of my comment: people have a warped view of "normal" as being the first thing they experience.

For example: sea level changes in the last 20,000 years are massive [1]. Over that time the Sahara was a desert, became tropical and became a desert again (~6200 years ago) [2]. Climate change is viewed by many as a significant factor in the Bronze Age Collapse [3].

> So I don't think you can shrug it off and say "pah, this all happened before". So did WWII

Seriously?

[1]: https://judithcurry.com/2011/07/12/historic-variations-in-se...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara#:~:text=By%20around%204....

[3]: https://www.latimes.com/science/la-xpm-2013-aug-15-la-sci-sn...

> If the last 10,000 years of relative climate stability is unusual--and it seems to be at least within the context of the last 100,000 years--then how can you argue it's "bad for life"?

Edit: I'm not arguing that 10k years of climate stability is bad for life. The opposite, actually.

I don't really think that the climate of 100,000 years ago matters too much, aside from the fact that our species (and those we rely on) survived. The critical difference is the last 10,000 years of relative stability is the period during which human population reached billions. I'm sure we can survive a return to inclement weather, but we probably won't thrive.

I’m aware of D-O cycles. I also wasn’t calling you a climate denier don’t worry.

The rapid rate of change induced by human caused warming still isn’t going be followed by a global cooling like D-O cycles. D-O cycles also occurred in a world that was still wild and not overdeveloped. The Earth’s biosphere was far more resilient back then. I don’t really see the point youre making? Was it just to disprove a statement I made?

> I'm skeptical about doom and gloom predictions of runaway climate change

The doom and gloom isn't for the Earth on a planetary scale. It will be just fine as a celestial body, but the biofilm stuck to the surface may be significantly inconvenienced.

Naw, only the multi-celled organisms. Most of us will be just fine.

Why is this an acceptable sentiment to have? This defeatist "who cares, the planet will be fine!" stance? Who gives a shit if it's happened numerous times in the past? Do you just want to sit by idly and let things get worse in what time you have left on the planet?

It started as an answer to the "restore nature, kill all humans" environmentalist ideologies that appeared at the 70's to 90's. It then became an attack at the "I don't care about Nature" anti-enviromentalism from the 80's to 00's.

Nowadays I think this comment has no target, it's just repeated as a joke.

Yeah, it's too bad multiple functioning neurons wired together seems to be a necessary condition for cognition.

Earth will be completely unhospitable in the next billion years, at least for aerobic life.

That I find fascinating!

200-500 million years after Earth formed, life was there. We witness it now and 1 billion years from now it will all be gone. A bit like "tears in rain", or more like "tears in vacuum/hard radiation".

That depends on if we're still around or not by then. That's a long time, so I don't like our chances. But we could well engineer our way out of that predicament if technology and civilization keeps progressing.

> My favourite example: for the first 60M years of trees existing, there were no organisms to digest the wood of dead trees. They just sat there or maybe burned. This is where 95% of the coal comes from.

Intuitively that seems almost unbelievable, given how quickly microbes evolve to exploit potential food sources, including novel types of plastics. And Wikipedia says of it: "However, a 2016 study largely refuted this idea, finding extensive evidence of lignin degradation during the Carboniferous, and that shifts in lignin abundance had no impact on coal formation. They suggested that climatic and tectonic factors were a more plausible explanation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation

If you already have a large variety of microbes capable of digesting a lot of different stuff then that gives a good starting point. Back then that may not have been the case.

Then publish a paper and cite it from the Wikipedia page? I find it astonishing that you seem to be arguing against the current body of documented research into the topic and without citation. Do you not think that the existing literature has already considered your revelation? What does the existing literature have to say about it?

Edit: I mean, what I see here is:

<parent> Here's the existing body of research on this topic.

<jacquesm> I disagree.

How does this add to the discussion?

I think you misread my comment.

It's a single study, which is still only presented as a counterpoint to the "nothing could digest lignin yet" hypothesis in the Wikipedia article that the parent linked.

That HARDLY counts as "the existing body of research on this topic."

What are YOU adding to the conversation? At least the gp comment was engaging with the intuitive reasoning line of the topic, you're just aggressively nitpicking people over your own misreadings.

Similar to Chernobyl now some areas have very little leaf litter or wood decaying. Even 32 years later some areas have not recovered.

> But the Earth will (ultimately) be fine.

What does that even mean? The Earth will be what it is. There is no 'fine' or 'not fine'. "Save the planet" really means "keep the planet in a state that is good for us."

I agree that life will be fine, I don't think the total-extinction-of-everything people are right. Earth will be fine. Some species will thrive, others will die out, generalists will do well at first and then as the environment re-stabilises they will speciate into specialists. I do think, however, that this process is subjectively not going to be very fun for the species involved, especially in the first 10-20%.

So those little ****ers have been spreading their misery for at least 46 million years. There's no hope for us lot then.

I definitely think we should get rid of mosquitos while we have the chance.

Imagine if civilization crumbles, and our descendants, huddled in caves and trying to find enough food to eat, are all getting diseases from these things, and people look back at us and say "but they thought it wasn't ethical to kill mosquitos".

I live in Alaska, famous for its mosquitoes as well as megafauna like bears, caribou, moose, wolves, migratory birds, fish, seals, whales etc.

I often wonder if those mosquitoes don’t fulfill some strange yet essential role in that beautiful ecosystem’s continuation.

Would love to hear that no, we can safely eliminate them and all the other cool and cuddly ones will be fine. But with my luck…

Really though, I’d like to see better medical technologies to deal with illnesses.

Couldn't we run experiments to discover whether they really have this role?

Like for example choosing an island with mosquitoes (and far enough from other lands as to not be rapidly repopulated) eliminating them there and seeing what the effect is in the ecosystem?

I wonder if something like this has ever been tried.

I think they're deploying these (https://www.oxitec.com/en/our-technology) in the Florida Keys (https://www.keysmosquitoproject.com/our-solution)

Mosquito biomass is not negligible I think. Surely some critters will suffer if we remove mosquitos.

Afaik there are some species of birds that rely on mosquitoes for most of their diet.

Fish eat mosquito larva.

Mosquitoes play an important (if at times unknown) role in ecosystems. The golden rule of conservation is never to play God. The introduction of rabbits in Australia are a particularly famous example of attempting to do so, where they decimated local ecosystems.

It's not about ethical, it's about severe disruptions to ecosystems with unknown consequences. We know very little and are not capable of playing God without paying the price for it.

I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitos, and before long they were cloning DNA...

Eocene would be one of the great land mass formations if ever we decided to move our digital era and advancements in that time.

Stoked to show the world what a real pandemic looks like....

So can there ever be a way of creating a Jurassic park in real life?

Nope. Well, not without some extensive DNA meddling, to the extent that it may LOOK like a dinosaur, but it really isn't.

Putting aside the DNA issue (see other comments), there's also environmental issues - the atmosphere during prehistoric times (I'm not an expert here, so excuse the vagueness) was far more oxygen-rich that it is now. If a real dinosaur managed to time-travel to our present time, it would die of asphyxiation like a fish out of water.

I guess if we are meddling with dna we can program them to need less oxygen?

ooooh, one of the older but nicer article of Smithsonian Magazine.

Jurassic Park lied to me?

/smack/ 46 million year old virus goes off.

It's DNA or RNA will also have degraded substantially.

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