Scientists recover proteins from a 24 million-year-old rhino fossil. Are dinosaurs next?
The 24 million-year-old tooth, which was unearthed in the Canadian Arctic, contains proteins that are 10 times older than the most ancient known DNA. Using the sample, scientists have now analyzed the oldest detailed protein sequence on record.
'Enamel is so hard it protects these proteins over deep time (long time scales),' said Ryan Sinclair Paterson, a postdoctoral researcher at the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who led the Canadian research. 'It's essentially like a vault. What we did was unlock this vault, at least for this specific fossil.'
The study of ancient DNA preserved in bones, fossils and dirt has revolutionized archaeological science, pulling back the curtain on lost empires, mysterious clans, ice age creatures and previously unknown human species. Ancient proteins promise a similar revolution for fossils that are many millions of years old and currently beyond the chronological reach of ancient DNA.
The study, which published July 9 in the scientific journal Nature, showcases the enormous potential of the field, known as paleoproteomics.
Proteins, which are made up of sequences of amino acids, are more robust than DNA, a fragile molecule that degrades relatively easily. Although proteins contain less detailed information, they can help to elucidate a specimen's evolutionary history, diet, even in some cases the sex of a fossil.
'The next step is to demonstrate that it's not just one sample, one lucky strike,' said coauthor Enrico Cappellini, a professor at the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute who has pioneered methods to extricate proteins from fossils and was involved in the Canadian research.
'But potentially there's a huge area of research that could be further clarified and then, if we really push it farther … we could even start to investigate dinosaurs,' he added.
Cappellini and Paterson, along with colleagues at the University of York and the Canadian Museum of Nature, recovered sequences from seven proteins preserved inside the fossilized rhino tooth.
Sequencing ancient proteins involves determining the order of amino acids in a sample. By comparing the sequences with those of living and extinct relatives, the scientists were able to glean information about the evolution of the rhino. The analysis revealed that it diverged from the same family as living rhinos about 41 million to 25 million years ago.
'In the fossil record, there were some crazy forms (of rhinoceros species). There's the woolly rhinoceros, and maybe you've heard of the Siberian unicorn with the gigantic horn,' Paterson said. 'What we were able to do is compare our mystery rhino with other forms and find out where it falls in the family tree.'
Separate research, also published July 9 in the journal Nature, which sampled fossils from Kenya's Turkana Basin, suggests that biomolecules can survive for millions of years, even in searing, tropical environments.
The study, which analyzed 10 mammal fossils, including the relatives of today's elephants, hippos and rhinos, was published by researchers at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute and Harvard University.
They recovered proteins from five of the fossils dated 1.5 million to 18 million years ago, and found that even in tropical regions with high temperatures scientists can extract prehistoric proteins, which can reveal links between ancient elephants and rhinos and their modern-day relatives.
While the information contained in the Kenyan proteins wasn't as detailed as that found in the Canadian fossil, the authors said that their presence within enamel tissues in one of the world's warmest regions holds promise that proteins in much older fossils could be discovered.
'We were excitingly successful. We went back to about 18 million years. I think going back in time should be possible,' said study author Timothy Cleland, a physical scientist at the Museum Conservation Institute.
The research on the Canadian fossil was 'sound and super interesting,' said Maarten Dhaenens, a researcher at the University of Ghent in Belgium who specializes in proteomics. However, Dhaenens, who wasn't involved in either study, said the methodology used on the Kenyan fossils was complex and less tested. The researchers' findings, he argued, are harder to interpret and warranted a more thorough assessment.
'The data is publicly available, so we should be able to verify their claims through manual validation, but this takes time,' he said via email.
Evan Saitta, paleontologist and research associate at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, said it was 'shocking' to find proteins preserved within fossils at tropical latitudes and added that the findings needed replication. It had been previously assumed that cold temperatures were necessary to slow down the breakdown of proteins.
'If that is a true result … it should be very easy to replicate,' he noted. 'We should be able to go around all different fossil sites all over the world and find enamel peptides (proteins).'
Getting proteins from fossils this old would be a palaeontologist's dream come true, said Matthew Collins, the McDonald Professor in Palaeoproteomics at the UK's University of Cambridge, who agreed that the research on the Canadian fossil was more convincing. Collins, like Saitta, was not involved in the new research.
'This is amazing. It's really exciting, but at the same time I've been disappointed so much in my career by thinking that we had very old proteins and we didn't,' added Collins, who has tried to recover proteins from dinosaur fossils.
Collins and Saitta were part of a team that detected amino acids in a titanosaur eggshell fragment, according to research published in 2024. The egg was laid by a plant-eating sauropod, a huge, long-necked dinosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous, shortly before dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago.
However, the dinosaur eggshell lacked any identifiable protein sequences. Their results were akin to identifying five letters in a novel, revealing only a pattern of decay that showed there were once proteins in the eggshell, said Saitta.
'There's no sequence left, no information, just the little individual Lego building blocks of (amino acids),' Collins said.
Discover your world
Go beyond the headlines and explore the latest scientific achievements and fascinating discoveries. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Getting protein information from a dinosaur tooth is a long shot, and Saitta noted that he had given up looking for proteins in dinosaur fossils in favor of exploring more interesting research questions.
Not only are dinosaur fossils far older than the fossils in the two studies, he noted, but they mostly date back to a hothouse period in the global climate when there were no ice caps. What's more, on average, dinosaur fossils are buried far deeper and thus have experienced far greater geothermal heat. It's also not clear whether dinosaur teeth had thick enough enamel to preserve proteins, he added.
Cappellini and Paterson said it might be possible to retrieve useful protein information from dinosaur fossils within 10 years, although there were other interesting questions to investigate first, such as how mammals came to dominate the planet after the dinosaurs' demise.
'I really think some sites might preserve dinosaur proteins in deep time. Maybe we can give those a shot,' Paterson said.
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Working people who choose to wear MAGA red caps hate science for their own reasons: It tells them things about disease and environmental destruction and, say, women's reproductive health that they cannot bear to face. Scientific findings often do not jibe with their religious beliefs. If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and were never taught how to distinguish between faith and knowledge, you're naturally going to have a testy relationship with science. By its nature of openness to new ideas, scientific inquiry exemplifies the secular worldview of liberals. Science levels the playing field. It's woke. Scientists discriminate about the significance of evidence, but they do not discriminate about the significance of different human beings. (That is what the MAGA faithful think their religion is for — because Republicans have spent a long time perverting Christianity, too, to justify their greed and bigotry.) From reading the writers of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson knew science was evening out the social playing field. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, historian Stephen E. Ambrose notes that amid all the contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson never relinquished his idealism about all men being created equal: In his last message to America, on June 24, 1826, ten days before he died on July 4 (the same day that John Adams died), Jefferson declined an invitation to be in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote, 'All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.' There's the danger to those who consider themselves superior — by race, color, creed or position on the Forbes annual list of billionaires — to the mass of men and women. Scientific advancements make us ever more aware that we are all the same and should enjoy the same basic rights to education, health care, civil liberties like voting, freedom of and freedom from religion, and the freedom to read or otherwise consume whatever opinions or cultural works we choose — the very things that the current occupant of the White House and his MAGA followers are working to take away from us. Beyond the historical friction between science and religious beliefs (for which earlier scientists could be imprisoned or burned at the stake), the main reason MAGA hates science is human-caused global climate change. Al Gore famously called global warming an 'inconvenient truth,' but Donald Trump persists in calling it 'a hoax,' while defunding climate research, green technology, NOAA and FEMA. The COVID pandemic gave MAGA followers many more incoherent reasons to distrust science, while watching 'their favorite president' politicize every aspect of the response. Apparently, millions would rather suffer mightily — or even die, as many willfully unvaccinated people did — than admit they were wrong. It's a sad aspect of human nature to feel we have such sunk costs in our often-wrongheaded opinions that we are willing to perish for them. I was a biology major in college for a few years, with vague plans of medical school, vaguely until I switched to journalism. I would not pretend to be a scientist based on that curtailed education, but I did spend 36 years in medical publishing. As a production editor and later as a submission systems manager, I came to understand the significant work of researchers and the selfless work of the many peer reviewers who help editors determine which studies merit publication. For many journals I worked with, the acceptance rates were astonishingly small. MAGA conspiracy heads might call that publication process elitist, and claim that people with worthwhile ideas are being kept out of the conversation. Most people in the sciences, however, understand the process as separating the wheat from the chaff by culling out the many papers that for one reason or another — perhaps poor design or insignificant findings — fail to advance scientific knowledge. But you don't need any understanding of science to understand that what Trump and his party of grifters and religious zealots are doing to universities by withholding research funding will be economically devastating to this country, slowing scientific progress and seriously disrupting the lives and careers of many researchers, technicians, lab assistants and students. The long-term negative effects of Trump's attack on science, which are also part of the full-spectrum MAGA assault on education and the nonpartisan civil service, will likely be even worse. Students will be increasingly reluctant to pursue careers in science. Only a months ago, STEM courses in high school and college were viewed as critical to the future of American ingenuity and enterprise, a big part of what actually made America great. It's impossible to gauge just how much damage will be done as we ban vaccines, deny climate science and make measles great again. Many MAGA supporters don't want to share 'their' America with brown people who may or may not be citizens; too many of them welcome the persecution and deportation of longtime U.S. residents who put in long hours at child care centers, hotels and restaurants, construction and landscaping companies, hospitals and nursing homes, and in agricultural fields, doing the thankless and often grueling work of picking and delivering the crops that feed the nation. Britain's decision to leave the European Union — one of the worst self-inflicted wounds of recent political history — has cost the U.K. an estimated 6% drop in GDP so far. The probable result of MAGA's lust to spend billions on hiring more masked, secret police-style ICE agents to deport hard-working, tax-paying immigrants, even if we look beyond the human suffering, will be a Brexit-level recession on steroids. Ultimately, what our felonious, ever-grifting president wants to do is to destroy all expertise in this country. That's what autocrats do. The manchild MAGA leader can't stand for any so-called experts to question him when he makes idiotic suggestions about public health proposes setting off nuclear bombs inside a hurricane or tries to change the longstanding name of a geographical feature to gratify his fragile ego. He wants to claim that his supposedly big and beautiful bill is the most popular legislation in history and that he's the greatest president ever, and doesn't want to hear egghead historians tell him otherwise. Trump hates to be questioned — so he hates journalists, scientists and anyone else with the kind of education that encourages critical thinking. That's why he has surrounded himself with an entire Cabinet of white nationalist frat boys, shameless sycophants and fellow grifters — not to mention a supermajority of right-wing Supreme Court justices who appear ready to hand him absolute power. 'American Robin,' a poem by Barbara Crooker that was recently featured in George Bilgere's 'Poetry Town' newsletter, is about our inability to respond appropriately to the devastation of human-made climate change. But it applies equally well to all the anti-science, misogynist, racist, Dark Enlightenment nonsense coming from the right that seeks to rob you, your children and your grandchildren of a financially and environmentally secure future. It begins this way: Here's that bird again, launching from the rhododendron, banging his forehead on my living room window. Thump. Thump. Does he see his own reflection in the glass or does he see a rival, a threat to his nest? I hang a black raptor silhouette in the middle square, but that does not deter him. Knock yourself out, I keep thinking. Next, I try cardboard, then a sheet of newspaper smeared with its terrible news. He comes back. Do I admire him for his persistence or shrug at his stupidity? Thunk. Thunk. Read the whole poem; I'll wait. One could read Crooker's dismay at the American robin's thumps and thunks against her windowpane as a rhyme for the name of a certain infamous conman turned populist demagogue. But that is perhaps unfair — to the poet and the bird. This article previously appeared in slightly different form at Medium. Used by permission. The post Why MAGA hates science so much appeared first on Solve the daily Crossword
