Dinosaurs roamed the Earth more than 65 million years
ago, and paleontologists and amateur fossil hunters are still unearthing traces of them today. The minerals in fossilized eggs and shell fragments provide snapshots into these creatures’ early lives, as well as their fossilization processes. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry have analyzed the molecular makeup of fossilized dinosaur eggshells from Mexico, finding nine amino acids and evidence of ancient protein structures.
The big lie opening basically puts a happy mask over the Darwin scream momentarily, assuring the reader that all is well with the millions of years framework. Another part of the strategy is to quickly change the subject. The ACS plotters immediately jump to the topic of how many dinosaurs laid eggs, and what minerals the eggshells contained, as if nobody saw the falsification slip by. Calcium carbonate and other material replaced some of the original biomaterial, they say. But the truth slipped out:
Say it isn’t so! screams Darwin, gagging on the implications.Then, with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), the team found nine amino acids among the five samples, but only lysine was in all of them. In addition, they identified evidence of secondary protein structures, including turns, α-helices, β-sheets and disordered structures, which were preserved for millions of years by being engrained in the minerals. The FT-IR bands corresponding to amino acids and secondary structures could be indicative of ancestral proteins that have not been characterized before, the researchers say.