[Rockhounds] Possible Dinosaur DNA Has Been Found

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. It is not as big as
an *Apatosaurus* femur or as impressive as a *Tyrannosaurus* jaw. The
object is a just a scant shard of cartilage from the skull of a baby
hadrosaur called *Hypacrosaurus* that perished more than 70 million years
ago. But it may contain something never before seen from the depths of the
Mesozoic era: degraded remnants of dinosaur DNA.

Genetic material is not supposed to last over such time periods—not by a
long shot. DNA begins to decay at death. Findings from a 2012 study
<https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2012.1745> on moa
bones show an organism’s genetic material deteriorates at such a rate that
it halves itself every 521 years. This speed would mean paleontologists can
only hope to recover recognizable DNA sequences from creatures that lived
and died within the past 6.8 million years—far short of even the last
nonavian dinosaurs.

But then there is the *Hypacrosaurus* cartilage. In a study published
earlier this year
<https://academic.oup.com/nsr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/nsr/nwz206/5762999>,
Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Alida Bailleul and her
colleagues proposed that in that fossil, they had found not only evidence
of original proteins and cartilage-creating cells but a chemical signature
consistent with DNA.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/possible-dinosaur-dna-has-been-found/