DINOSAUR bones retrieved from a coal mine have given up some of their secrets to scientists at Brigham Young University in Utah. Scott Woodward and his team have extracted short stretches of the dinosaur鈥檚 DNA, although they have a long way to go before they can reconstruct a whole creature as in Michael Crichton鈥檚 Jurassic Park.
The longest sequence they extracted is 174 base pairs, with only 134 pairs useful for genetic analysis, says Woodward. He extracted DNA from nine samples during a year of experiments, but the success rate was only 1.8 per cent. 鈥淚f we hadn鈥檛 gotten one in an early round [of experiments], we probably would have given up,鈥� he admits.
The DNA came from two unfossilised pieces of bone from deposits 80 million years old in a Utah coal mine. Although the prehistoric owner of the bones has not been identified, their size and location makes Woodward 鈥渃onfident they are dinosaur bones鈥�.
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Woodward鈥檚 group had hoped to clarify how dinosaurs were related to birds, reptiles and mammals, but they found the dinosaur DNA sequence was roughly equidistant from all three groups. Despite this failure, they write in this week鈥檚 Science, they have shown DNA can be recovered from well-preserved dinosaur bones. The oldest DNA yet extracted comes from a weevil trapped in amber 120 million years ago.