29M-year-old grasshopper nest found intact with eggs, study says | Hacker News Reader

29M-year-old grasshopper nest found intact with eggs, study says

cnn.com

77 pointscarabiner33 comments

Oh hey, that's in my neck of the woods, sort of. The John Day fossil beds are worth a trip as well as the Painted Hills. That area has some spectacular scenery that feels almost southwestern, with buttes and canyons and rivers. One of my favorite bits of Oregon that doesn't get many visitors.

https://ridewithgps.com/ambassador_routes/98-twickenham-road...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/pQE8c4LfEGVbss789

https://photos.app.goo.gl/g9W9VAgshh58M5yPA

https://photos.app.goo.gl/9t4hfYsE2zvAQHWM7

The manner of discovery is almost as remarkable as the find itself:

>Christopher Schierup, a collection manager for the National Parks Service, discovered the egg case in the fossil beds in July 2012. Schierup was conducting a routine visual survey of the site when he spotted the object, which was embedded in a chunk of rock that had rolled down a hill, Famoso recalled.

So absurd I love it.

Though this is 30 My old, I looked up grasshoppers and grasses on wikipedia:

    Grasshoppers are 250 My old
    Grasses are about 50 My old

But I suppose these eggs are recent enough that the mother could have lived in, and even eaten grasses. Apparently they aren't particularly picky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper

And grasses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae

Actually grasshoppers have been around longer than dinosaurs, who, apart from birds (many of whom are notorious grain-eaters), didn't stick around long enough to actually eat any grass.

I'd be very curious to see how much genetic material they could recover from this. It'd be fascinating to see how much of the grasshopper genome has been conserved over 29 million years. I.e. how different are today's grasshoppers from those from 29M years ago?

Probably nothing; fossilized means it's mineralized, turned into stone. At best they can see what it looked like (they mentioned a scan). They can get (some?) DNA from things they get out of the permafrost though, like wooly mammoths.

DNA doesn't last that long. I think the record is about 2 million years, tiny fragments of DNA recovered from samples drilled from under Greenland ice.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/unlocking-the-oldest-kn...

Soooo... you're telling me no Jurassic Park?

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They started blocking my browser a few months ago (safari with ad blocker), I just stopped reading CNN all together.

Advertisers have stopped caring about lies now, awesome. I’m not disabling my adblock even if my own grandmother wanted me to. Advertisers are a scourge on the internet.

Was actually found a dozen years ago.

So 29000012 years old now!

Doesn’t look a day over 289994200 if I’m being honest

Strange fossil. It does not look like something so old.

John day! I visit this place almost every summer. Its remote with true dark sky and almost no cell range. You can find some truly gem of places to see around here.

My good memories from 2017 solar eclipse are still etched into my brain:)

I just wonder how many discoveries were just shrugged off or destroyed by people who couldn’t care less or didn’t know.

If I came across something like this in the wild, I wouldn’t think much of it, either.

Reading out complete fossilized DNA would be cool.

Would also be interesting to see how much of it has changed compared with current grasshoppers

DNA has a pretty hard lifespan of under a couple million years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA

Impossible. DNA degrades very quickly. Half-life is ~520 years, and you'd assume any "storage" done quickly and ad-hoc (as these things always are) would not be ideal conditions to maximize this number.

That's the typical half life. The record is ~2 million years, obviously just tiny fragments

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/unlocking-the-oldest-kn...

> That's the typical half life. The record is ~2 million years, obviously just tiny fragments

Half-life of DNA is the time it takes for half the bonds to snap. Far longer than 2 million years is achievable based on that half-life, at least under ideal conditions.

And that’s just tiny fragments too.

Super neat. We keep finding such amazing old things.

This is how we get Tiny Jurassic Park.

funny how evolution keeps species identical for tens of millions of years

huh... i did not know that grasshoppers made nests.

I thought this was a 29 year old Male grasshopper...time for bed.

He's a single parent looking for love.

Could also be single and depressed. Soon turning 30 and all he has is just a bunch of soon-to-be-kids. Poor fellow.

29 year old male grasshopper nest with eggs would certainly be something.

I read it first as 29 year old M grasshopper has a nest egg, and I was like, fuck a damn grasshopper has beat me to FIRE.

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