A Fossil Rewriting Dinosaur History

A DNA STRAND LIKE ME IS A BLUEPRINT for building a living thing," says the anthropomorphic double-helix Mr. DNA at the start of 1993's Jurassic Park.

- 

"And sometimes, animals that went extinct millions of years ago, like dinosaurs, left their blueprints behind for us to find."

Luckily, pulling organic material out of fossils seems to be almost as possible in real life as it is in the movie (still waiting on that DNA discovery, though). A new study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, analyzed a fossilized hip bone from an Edmontosaurus using “advanced mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques.” Those techniques—including protein sequenc-ing—led to the discovery of bone collagen, which remained intact despite fossilization.