Scientists discovered perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo inside fossilized egg
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But none of this contain even a miniscule amount of meat or organic material or DNA of a dinosaur. Those already disintegrated aeons ago. DNA half life is around 500 years. After a million years, it would have degraded so bad you literally have nothing left to reconstruct no matter how much sample you discover.
If you start with an entire dinosaur, let say 10 tons, and let be generous and have 1% of that being DNA, you get 1e15 copies of the genome, assuming a 10Gb genome. After 25,000 years, you get less than 1 copy left. Now make it 25 millions years...
I know this "half-life" term is kind of a misnomer since unlike radioisotope where it is unaffected by environmental conditions, DNA "half-life" can be longer depending on things like temperature and pressure. But still, on the scale of millions of years, it becomes exceedingly improbable that we can find even 1 copy of a dinosaur genome left.
That article with the 521 half life of DNA was complete bull. In 2022 they found DNA from a 2 million year old mastodon [1].
The whole 521 year half life is something like "it was that in our sample, and we can't guarantee that the result generalizes". Good maybe for a high school science project, not good for a paper in Nature.
> Our results indicate that short fragments of DNA could be present for a very long time; at –5°C, the model predicts a half-life of 158 000 years for a 30 bp mtDNA fragment in bone. Even rough estimates such as this imply that sequenceable bone DNA fragments may still be present more than 1 Myr after deposition in deep frozen environments. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that future research may identify authentic DNA that is significantly older than the current record of approximately 450–800 kyr from Greenlandic ice cores.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...
After reading a paper I don’t think I’ve ever had a thought like this before: did they run that past a legal team before publication? That sounds like a lawyer wrote it.
> It is tempting to suggest that we can now predict the temporal limits of DNA survival, and finally refute the claims of authentic DNA from Cretaceous and Miocene specimens. This is, however, not straightforward. One needs information on the number of template molecules in living tissues, and estimates of post-mortem DNA decay rates for each tissue type. However, the half-life predictions display the extreme improbability that an authentic 174 bp long mtDNA fragment of an 80–85 Myr old bone could have been amplified.
I looked at the paper partly because I was interested in the possibility that some multi-base strands survive, even though such strands would be very short. The "half-life" here was measured by qPCR, where a relatively large amplicon (a fragment being amplicated via PCR) was used. So this study doesn't preclude a possibility of very short (~100 bp) strands surviving, though this would require most enzymes to be much less effective at breaking such strands.
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.174...
what about imputing genomics from the phenotypically similar present day animals (birds, reptiles, whatever else)?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/possible-dinosaur...
but it's been pretty quiet afterwards.
27cm is not exactly what I would call tiny. For comparison, this is what Wikipedia has to say on the topic of ostrich eggs:
> on average they are 15 cm (5.9 in) long, 13 cm (5.1 in) wide, and weigh 1.4 kilograms (3.1 lb)
It's almost twice as long. Talk about megafauna.
Looking for alternative sources, I found this:
> The unhatched dinosaur’s 24-centimetre-long skeleton is curled inside the egg, with its head tucked tightly into its body. The egg is 17 centimetres long and 8 centimetres wide.
( https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302492-fossilised-dino... )
Okay, so they were talking about the size of the dinosaur if it stretched out of its curled position inside the egg. The egg meanwhile is a little larger than an ostrich's egg. Still not tiny by any means, but slightly less mindblowing.
But seriously, I can not help but wonder at what types of artifacts and specimens have just been totally lost and will never be randomly found.
Cartilage-only fishes might have been abundant eons ago and they could be as big as a megalodon or even bigger. But because they didn't have teeth, we will never know of them...
A single cell organism somewhere might have hold a miraculous protein or enzyme that test the boundaries of physics or can cure cancer(s). But they are extinct now and we will never know of them.
An ancestor of the octopi might have developed intelligence and tool-making. But since we have no way to find records of their civilization, we will never know of them.
That is why an extinction of a species is so significant. It means they will disappear forever, never to reappear in the exact same form again. We will forever lose them and never know what secret they might have carried in their genome or biology or life.
And yet, there are species going extinct every single day, many of them are due to human...
Study released 2021....research from 2015?
A headline & discussion from 2021:
Scientists find preserved dinosaur embryo preparing to hatch like a bird
I will start a new Religion and the Dinosaur(s) will be my God(s).
VR is the next best way.
I'm not sure if this theory is still accepted though, as it seems the current consensus is that the air was actually less oxygenated during the dinosaurs' lives.