Collagen found in 195 million-year-old dinosaur bone, perhaps

Abstract

Until now, the oldest proteins found were collagen fragments from an 80 million-year old Brachylophosaurus canadensis dinosaur femur. A new finding claims to have beaten that record by more than 100 million years. Robert R. Reisz, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto, and coworkers report that they have found collagen in tiny channels of a 195 million-year-old Lufengosaurus dinosaur rib fragment uncovered in Yunnan Province, China (Nat. Commun. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms14220). But some scientists aren’t convinced. These skeptics question whether the analysis of the fossil actually points to collagen. Usually when fossilized bones are analyzed, researchers dissolve the inorganic material and extract the organic material. Reisz and coworkers instead examined the organic material as it sat in the fossil. They looked for collagen in thin, longitudinal slices of bone using synchrotron-derived Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy. By analyzing the sample without dissolving the bone, “we can act...