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Oldest-Ever Proteins Extracted From 3.8-Million-Year-Old Ostrich Shells

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: September 18th, 2016, 3:00pm UTC

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Scientists have smashed through another time barrier in their search for ancient proteins from fossilized teeth and bones, adding to growing excitement about the promise of using proteins to study extinct animals and humans that lived more than 1 million years ago. Until now, the oldest sequenced proteins are largely acknowledged to come from a 700,000-year-old horse in Canada's Yukon territory, despite claims of extraction from much older dinosaurs. Now geneticists report that they have extracted proteins from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich egg shells in Laetoli, Tanzania, and from the 1.7-million-year-old tooth enamel of several extinct animals in Dmanisi, Georgia...extinct horses, rhinos, and deer, This raises the inevitable question. If we ever could clone a prehistoric species...should we?pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Oldest-Ever+Proteins+Extracted+From+3.8-Million-Year-Old+Ostrich+Shells%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2d8CltD"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F16%2F09%2F18%2F1814239%2Foldest-ever-proteins-extracted-from-38-million-year-old-ostrich-shells%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/09/18/1814239/oldest-ever-proteins-extracted-from-38-million-year-old-ostrich-shells?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="https://science.slashdot.org/story/16/09/18/1814239/oldest-ever-proteins-extracted-from-38-million-year-old-ostrich-shells?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/9VrDTpLp4Gg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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