Paleontologists Confirmed The Presence Of Collagen In 80-Million-Year-Old Brachylophosaurus Fossil

The sign of living dinosaurs was erased almost 65 million years ago from today. But still, dinosaurs fascinates Paleontologists. A recent study on dinosaur fossil reveals the evidence of Collagen at the bones.

A group of Paleontologists from North Carolina State University started working on a fossil of Brachylophosaurus. It is a kind of hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur and the fossil was almost 80 million years old. North Carolina State postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Elena Schroeter and the professor of biological sciences, Dr. Mary Schweitzer was appointed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for this research. In the year 2009, they first found the sign of collagen and their findings were first published in the journal of Proteome Research.

Prof. Schweitzer said in a statement,”Not only did we replicate part of the 2009 results, thanks to improved methods and technology we did it with a smaller sample and over a shorter period of time.” Peptides are the basic building blocks of protein and collagen is a type of protein so analyzing peptide from the collagen helps researchers to establish an evolutionary relationship between Jurassic and modern aged animals.

According to ScienceDaily, researchers collected those research samples from the thigh bone of the Brachylophosauruswhich is also known as Femur. For more accurate result they kept those exposed bones in a clean and sterile environment and decontaminated the mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer is a device which analyzes fossil specimens in molecular level. The team recovered eight sequences of peptides from the collagen by the advanced imaging technology of mass spectrometer.

Two among those eight sequences were identical to those sequences which were found in 2009 and the six sequences were totally new. By gathering the research data Prof. Schweitzer her team came into a decision that B. Canadensis aka Brachylophosaurus has similar collagen I with crocodilians and birds. Previous skeletal studies also confirm that the species comes from the hadrosaur family.