Dinosaur and mastodon fossils yield evidence of collagen with proteomics methods

摘要

John Asara, Mary Schweitzer, and colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, North Carolina State University, Montana State University, and the University of Chicago have detected evidence for the presence of protein in fossils from a 160,000-600,000-year-old mastodon and a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. In back-to-back papers, the researchers say that they have extracted organic material from a mastodon skull and a T. rex femur and analyzed the samples with a range of techniques.