Animal ID from tiny, old bones

Abstract

Identifying bones at an archaeological dig is a little like sorting shells at the beach. Often, the fragments are too small, worn down, or damaged to tell by eye what animal they used to be. Paleontologists regularly employ protein analysis to help identify old bones. However, one common peptide-fingerprinting technique requires removing many milligrams of the bone—too much for small or valuable fragments. Analytical chemists have now improved the current method to get better data from only 1 mg of bone ( Anal. Chem . 2023, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.2c03301 ) . They simultaneously streamlined the process so scientists can fingerprint the proteins from hundreds of bone fragments at once, including those that had been too rare, degraded, or small to study. DNA and proteins have both been helping paleontologists identify bones since the 1980s. Proteins last much longer than DNA because as bone fossilizes over time, it protects the bone proteins,