
Scientists extract genetic information from a 1.77M-year-old rhino tooth - bookofjoe
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190911142731.htm
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fattire
What ever happened to the 70 million year old soft tissue miraculously
discovered of a t-rex a decade ago?

[http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7285683/ns/technology_and_science-...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7285683/ns/technology_and_science-
science/t/scientists-recover-t-rex-soft-tissue/)

Was it delicious? Also, was there any DNA recoverable through this newer
method?

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bookofjoe
Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus
phylogeny
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1555-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1555-y)

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m23khan
dumb question: what can scientists do with this besides studying the DNA data?
Can they now clone that animal?

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burnte
Not a dumb question. No, we can't clone it. It will be an incomplete genome,
it's just a subset of the animal's entire DNA sequence, and it's reconstructed
from proteins. We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell
what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the
language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we
can't reconstruct the whole book yet.

~~~
sdrothrock
> We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language
> the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language
> (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't
> reconstruct the whole book yet.

If they had other teeth (from the same specimen or different ones of the same
species), would they be able to just combine them to fill in the gaps?

To follow your metaphor, to me this sounds like finding different copies of
the same printing, same edition, same book and combining them all to make a
complete book. Does the metaphor fall apart?

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acqq
Consider the size of the DNA "books": for example, the human genome is around
3 GB (uncompressed), much bigger than a single book on your shelf: King James
Bible as plain text is around 4 MB (uncompressed), so it's a factor of roughly
1000 times (being always copied in every cell of your body!) and we have many
complete copies and versions of older bibles but we still can't completely
reconstruct too old versions. But we can have a reasonable reconstruction of
the "tree" of the development of the known bibles.

And having just a single page from a bible can tell you quite good where that
bible fits in the tree of all known bibles.

~~~
sdrothrock
Thank you! I hadn't considered the size or amount missing from a given "book,"
that makes it much clearer.

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mynegation
I usually welcome editing the title to be in accordance with the guidelines
but tbh you guys went a bit overboard on this one. Previous version of the
title clearly indicated that it is about a tooth or an ancient rhinoceros, but
“enamel from Stephanorhinus”? Not very helpful.

~~~
bookofjoe
I did what I could.

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apacheCamel
Side note: When looking for HN posts, I tend to enjoy the ones where I know <4
words in the title.

DNA has always been such a fascinating topic to me. In school, we had such a
limited look into it and yet it seemed to be _the_ thing in what makes us
"us". I really hope as a society we continue to push the boundaries of our
knowledge to see what DNA can tell us. And out of teeth? That is just so
awesome.

~~~
nicwilson
For others who are having trouble understating the title, it basically
translates as: "Set of proteins in bit of tooth from very old rhino from
Georgia (the Caucuses) enables genetic classification of some related
species."

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riffraff
it's the first time in years I've read a sentence where I didn't know 1/3 of
the words, thank you :)

~~~
waynecochran
Reverse clickbait.

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aristophenes
No way, this title is perfect HackerNews clickbait. I was baited, and I was
not disappointed by the article. Or at least the abstract, which was as far as
I got. TLDR: They figured out how to use tooth enable to make genetic
associations between fossils, and learn some other things. And it's a lot more
reliable for old fossils than DNA!

Edit: Title at the time of writing my comment is "Early Pleistocene enamel
proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny" which is the actual
title from the article

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merricksb
This summary on ScienceDaily is much more comprehensible and also is not
paywalled:

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190911142731.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190911142731.htm)

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cityzen
That escalated quickly

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nouveau0
Oh yeah? and did they get the Rhino's consent?

