A team has extracted what could be DNA molecules from a 125-million-year-old fossil dinosaur, according to a study published [September 24] in Communications Biology. But other experts have voiced caution or outright skepticism about the findings.
Gizmodo reports the oldest sequenced DNA belongs to a million-year-old woolly mammoth. DNA is a relatively fragile molecule, and dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, so the idea of sequencing DNA from these ancient creatures has so far remained science fiction.
Evan Saitta, a researcher from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, tells Gizmodo that microbes on fossils could be mistaken for genetic material from the dinosaurs themselves.
Paleogeneticist Love Dalén from the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Sweden was part of the team that extracted million-year-old mammoth DNA. He calls the notion of DNA enduring in dinosaur remains almost “impossible,” adding in an email to Gizmodo, “We know from both massive empirical studies and theoretical models that even under completely frozen conditions, DNA molecules will not survive more than ca 3 million years.”
