Researchers have found clear chemical traces of decaying collagen in a duck-billed dinosaur fossil, upending beforehand held notions that any natural materials discovered inside such historical fossils have to be from some supply of contamination.
“This research shows beyond doubt that organic biomolecules, such as proteins like collagen, appear to be present in some fossils,” says College of Liverpool supplies scientist Steve Taylor.
“Our results have far-reaching implications. Firstly, it refutes the hypothesis that any organics found in fossils must result from contamination.”
The well-preserved fossil that was as soon as a dinosaur’s butt bone (sacrum) was excavated from South Dakota’s Hell Creek Formation in 2019. It belongs to a species of Edmontosaurus, one of many final non-avian dinosaurs recognized to have ever existed.
These large lizards, reaching as much as 12 meters (39 ft) in size, had been horny-beaked plant eaters that roamed alongside the notorious Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops in the course of the late Cretaceous round 73 million years in the past.
Collagen, the commonest protein present in bones, has beforehand been related to a hadrosaur’s leg bone in 2009 and an arm bone of a T. rex in 2007, however such finds are contested by different researchers, who argue any unique proteins would have been changed by the fossilization course of way back.
So, College of Liverpool engineer Lucien Tuinstra and colleagues used three impartial strategies, together with cross-polarized mild microscopy, to unambiguously determine and quantify decaying hydroxyproline, a novel constructing block of collagen.
“If the sequenced collagen is contamination by recent sources, then the sequence would be largely complete,” the researchers argue of their paper.
However the crew solely discovered brief sequences of the hydroxyproline amino acid, at low quantities, in keeping with historical and decayed collagen.
“Cross-polarized light microscopy images of fossil bones, collected for a century, should be revisited,” suggests Taylor.
“These images may reveal intact patches of bone collagen, potentially offering a ready-made trove of fossil candidates for further protein analysis. This could unlock new insights into dinosaurs – for example revealing connections between dinosaur species that remain unknown.”
The researchers additionally in contrast artificially aged collagen samples from a contemporary turkey and bovine, utilizing liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, and located no similarities with the Edmontosaurus pattern.
“The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” says Taylor.
This analysis was printed in Analytical Chemistry.
