And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights. Genesis 7:12
"About 1,600 years ago, salt miners in Iran apparently left their lamb lunch down the shaft. Their loss became scientists' gain. The now-mummified sheep carcass suggests that salt helps preserve
The research results, published in Biology Letters, showed probably the best-preserved DNA from any skin from that time. They sequenced DNA from the sheep skin and discovered that it was high enough quality to compare against modern sheep. Does this “exceptional ancient DNA preservation” have any bearing on discussions about preserved dinosaur DNA?
These effects make sense in light of the way we have used salt to
preserve foods like bacon. Microbes don’t thrive in dry, salty
conditions. But even with salt right next to the sheep skin to keep
microbes at bay, the sheep DNA was still fragmented. Clearly, chemistry
has been happening on that DNA, even with salt nearby.
The report cited a separate study explaining why DNA is expected to
decay. Its authors wrote, “Fragmentation through depurination is a
well-characterized process.” They also said, “The immutable depurination
process likely still imposes practical limits on DNA recovery in deep
time and recovering Mesozoic DNA, for example, remains extremely
unlikely.”
Thus, even if salt doubled the maximum time that DNA in skin could last,
we still shouldn’t find it in dinosaur bones said to be 70 million
years old. And yet we do—and none of those fossils were found next to
salt.
In the end, immutable depurination destroys DNA, yet actual DNA occurs
in some rare fossils. Salt-preserved DNA in a sheep’s skin doesn’t
resolve this huge discrepancy, but a young world would. A Noah’s Flood
origin for fossils including dinosaur bones places them within a time
range where we would still expect to find some rare DNA fragments even
without salt." ICR
