Impossible. DNA degrades very quickly. Half-life is ~520 years, and you'd assume any "storage" done quickly and ad-hoc (as these things always are) would not be ideal conditions to maximize this number.
> That's the typical half life. The record is ~2 million years, obviously just tiny fragments
Half-life of DNA is the time it takes for half the bonds to snap. Far longer than 2 million years is achievable based on that half-life, at least under ideal conditions.
Oh hey, that's in my neck of the woods, sort of. The John Day fossil beds are worth a trip as well as the Painted Hills. That area has some spectacular scenery that feels almost southwestern, with buttes and canyons and rivers. One of my favorite bits of Oregon that doesn't get many visitors.
I'd be very curious to see how much genetic material they could recover from this. It'd be fascinating to see how much of the grasshopper genome has been conserved over 29 million years. I.e. how different are today's grasshoppers from those from 29M years ago?
Probably nothing; fossilized means it's mineralized, turned into stone. At best they can see what it looked like (they mentioned a scan). They can get (some?) DNA from things they get out of the permafrost though, like wooly mammoths.
DNA doesn't last that long. I think the record is about 2 million years, tiny fragments of DNA recovered from samples drilled from under Greenland ice.
The manner of discovery is almost as remarkable as the find itself:
>Christopher Schierup, a collection manager for the National Parks Service, discovered the egg case in the fossil beds in July 2012. Schierup was conducting a routine visual survey of the site when he spotted the object, which was embedded in a chunk of rock that had rolled down a hill, Famoso recalled.
John day! I visit this place almost every summer. Its remote with true dark sky and almost no cell range. You can find some truly gem of places to see around here.
My good memories from 2017 solar eclipse are still etched into my brain:)
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Advertisers have stopped caring about lies now, awesome. I’m not disabling my adblock even if my own grandmother wanted me to. Advertisers are a scourge on the internet.
Though this is 30 My old, I looked up grasshoppers and grasses on wikipedia:
Grasshoppers are 250 My old
Grasses are about 50 My old
But I suppose these eggs are recent enough that the mother could have lived in, and even eaten grasses. Apparently they aren't particularly picky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper
Actually grasshoppers have been around longer than dinosaurs, who, apart from birds (many of whom are notorious grain-eaters), didn't stick around long enough to actually eat any grass.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 83.1 ms ] threadhttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/unlocking-the-oldest-kn...
Half-life of DNA is the time it takes for half the bonds to snap. Far longer than 2 million years is achievable based on that half-life, at least under ideal conditions.
https://ridewithgps.com/ambassador_routes/98-twickenham-road...
https://photos.app.goo.gl/pQE8c4LfEGVbss789
https://photos.app.goo.gl/g9W9VAgshh58M5yPA
https://photos.app.goo.gl/9t4hfYsE2zvAQHWM7
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/unlocking-the-oldest-kn...
>Christopher Schierup, a collection manager for the National Parks Service, discovered the egg case in the fossil beds in July 2012. Schierup was conducting a routine visual survey of the site when he spotted the object, which was embedded in a chunk of rock that had rolled down a hill, Famoso recalled.
My good memories from 2017 solar eclipse are still etched into my brain:)
If I came across something like this in the wild, I wouldn’t think much of it, either.
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And grasses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
Actually grasshoppers have been around longer than dinosaurs, who, apart from birds (many of whom are notorious grain-eaters), didn't stick around long enough to actually eat any grass.