<
https://theconversation.com/the-oldest-dna-ever-found-reveals-a-snapshot-of-a-vanished-world-196044>
"At the icy northern tip of Greenland, far into the Artic Circle, a deep bed of
sediment beneath the mouth of a fjord has lain frozen and undisturbed for 2
million years.
Known as the Kap København Formation, this relic of a vanished world dates to a
period when Earth was much warmer than it is today. The sediment built up in a
shallow bay over a period of 20,000 years, before being buried beneath ice and
permafrost.
Our team, led by Kurt Kjær, Mikkel Winter Pedersen and Eske Willerslev at
Copenhagen University, has extracted and analysed the oldest DNA ever recovered
from samples of this Greenlandic sediment. It reveals the plants, animals and
microorganisms that thrived in an ecosystem unlike anything in the modern
world.
As we report today in
Nature, this DNA is more than a million years older
than the previous record. We can now recover and directly study molecules that
were made inside plants and animals 2 million years ago, opening a new window
into the history of life on Earth."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
