Joel Kontinen
Science calls them the “oldest-ever proteins.” Their assumed age is “3.8 million years”, and researchers extracted them from ostrich egg shells found in Laetoli, Tanzania.
This might be a bit misleading, as collagen has been discovered in dinosaur bone, and collagen is certainly a protein.
Scientists have estimated that collagen could last perhaps 1– 2 million years if kept frozen, otherwise it would not last even half a million years.
Laetoli lies just south of the Equator on a plain where temperatures would hardly ever fall below the freezing point, so it seems that dogma (millions-of-years) means more to these researchers than letting the evidence speak for itself.
The preservation of DNA in “1.4 million year” old plankton, as well as blood vessels and radiocarbon (C-14) in dinosaur bone make it practically impossible to believe in millions of years.
But what beats all other discoveries of ancient protein is that of protein compounds in “1.88 billion year old” cyanobacteria.
Source:
Gibbons, Ann. 2016. Oldest-ever proteins extracted from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich shells. Science (16 September).
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