As a scientist, lab work can sometimes get monotonous. But in 2017, while a Ph.D. student of paleobiology at the University of Bristol in the U.K., I heard a gleeful exclamation from across the room. Kirsty Penkman, head of the North East Amino Acid Racemization lab at the University of York, had just read the data printed off the chromatograms and was practically jumping up and down.
The instrument had detected telltale signatures of ancient amino acids in eggshell. Amino acids are the building blocks that make up protein sequences in living organisms. But this wasn’t just any eggshell; it was a fossil from a titanosaur, a giant herbivorous dinosaur that lived about 70 million years ago.
Not much organic material survives over millions of years, which limits scientists’ ability to study the biology of extinct organisms compared to modern ones, whose proteins and DNA can be sequenced. As Penkman’s enthusiasm suggested, these amino acids were extraordinary.
