Posted on 10/03/2009 7:50:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
There’s no reason why you can’t preserve collagen tissue for millions of years. Place the tissue in an environment that precludes decay from bacteria, then let it dehydrate while encased in material that turns to rock. Move ahead millions of years... break open the rock and rehydrate. The tough part is preventing the decay, but I could imagine this happening under certain scenarios. Such as the tissue drying very quickly after death or the animal being buried within material such as volcanic ash that cuts off oxygen.
As to how such long term DNA preservation could occur, Asimov’s line comes to mind: “The universe is not only stranger than we think it is, it is more strange than we can think it is.”
Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus Rex Revealed by Mass SpectrometryFossilized bones from extinct taxa harbor the potential for obtaining protein or DNA sequences that could reveal evolutionary links to extant species. We used mass spectrometry to obtain protein sequences from bones of a 160,000- to 600,000-year-old extinct mastodon (Mammut americanum) and a 68-million-year-old dinosaur (Tyrannosaurus rex). The presence of T. rex sequences indicates that their peptide bonds were remarkably stable. Mass spectrometry can thus be used to determine unique sequences from ancient organisms from peptide fragmentation patterns, a valuable tool to study the evolution and adaptation of ancient taxa from which genomic sequences are unlikely to be obtained.
John M. Asara, Mary H. Schweitzer,
Lisa M. Freimark, Matthew Phillips,
Lewis C. Cantley
Science 13 April 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5822, pp. 280 - 285
DOI: 10.1126/science.1137614
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