14 ms·

A Fossilized Blood-Engorged Mosquito Is Found for the First Time Ever (2013)

112 points by areoform 5y ago

egberts1 5y ago
ooooh, one of the older but nicer article of Smithsonian Magazine.
thrtythreeforty 5y ago
I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitos, and before long they were cloning DNA...
tsouth 5y ago
YarickR2 5y ago
/smack/ 46 million year old virus goes off.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  It's DNA or RNA will also have degraded substantially.
paulcole 5y ago
Jurassic Park lied to me?
taurusnoises 5y ago
Stoked to show the world what a real pandemic looks like....
Lendal 5y ago
It's an Eocene mosquito. Dinosaurs were already extinct. Notable about this period is it was the last time there was no ice at the poles and water covered a lot more of the earth, as you can see from the map of the Eocene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene which means there were probably a lot of blood-filled mosquitos around during the Eocene. Also from the article: DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood.
- mromanuk 5y ago
  > Also from the article: DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood. Does this mean that the oldest creature that can be “restored” should be dead for less than 521 years old?
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    The article they cite says this might not apply in caves or permafrost for example. It gives ~1.5 million years as an endpoint for readability
    - ummonk 5y ago
      Yeah we've sampled a full horse genome from 700,000 years ago.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    It means that half the DNA is gone after 521 years. After another 521 years, half of the remaining DNA is gone too, leaving 1/4 of the original DNA. Figure that rate of decay into your "restoration" technique to know for how long an organism can be "restored" after being dead. Does your technique require 100% of the DNA? Better catch them on asphalt. Is 50% good enough? You could probably restore Newton. You could do Paul with 6% give or take.
    - jessriedel 5y ago
      I don't think that analysis is right. From the original Royal Society paper: > The average DNA half-life within this geographically constrained fossil assemblage was estimated to be 521 years for a 242 bp mtDNA sequence, corresponding to a per nucleotide fragmentation rate (k) of 5.50 × 10–6 per year. If there is a 50% chance that a 242 base pair sequence has a break in 500 years, you will be able to recover the full sequence in way more than 50% of 500 year old samples. First, you have many copies of the same DNA fragment in a macroscopic drop of blood, so some will not have a break. Second, even if it's older and all strands have at least one break, you can look at a bunch of half strands or tenth strands and infer the complete sequence. Likewise, if I had a thousand copies of a book where each copy had a few destroyed pages, it would not be hard to reconstitute the entire contents of the books. I think the above rate of decay would allow for recovery of the sequence in a sample after probably tens of thousands of years. This is why mammoths, but not dinosaurs, are typically the targets for brining back extinct mammals.
cutler 5y ago
So those little ****ers have been spreading their misery for at least 46 million years. There's no hope for us lot then.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  I definitely think we should get rid of mosquitos while we have the chance. Imagine if civilization crumbles, and our descendants, huddled in caves and trying to find enough food to eat, are all getting diseases from these things, and people look back at us and say "but they thought it wasn't ethical to kill mosquitos".
  - sixstringtheory 5y ago
    I live in Alaska, famous for its mosquitoes as well as megafauna like bears, caribou, moose, wolves, migratory birds, fish, seals, whales etc. I often wonder if those mosquitoes don’t fulfill some strange yet essential role in that beautiful ecosystem’s continuation. Would love to hear that no, we can safely eliminate them and all the other cool and cuddly ones will be fine. But with my luck… Really though, I’d like to see better medical technologies to deal with illnesses.
    - nfc 5y ago
      Couldn't we run experiments to discover whether they really have this role? Like for example choosing an island with mosquitoes (and far enough from other lands as to not be rapidly repopulated) eliminating them there and seeing what the effect is in the ecosystem? I wonder if something like this has ever been tried.
      - interestica 5y ago
        I think they're deploying these (https://www.oxitec.com/en/our-technology https://www.oxitec.com/en/our-technology) in the Florida Keys (https://www.keysmosquitoproject.com/our-solution https://www.keysmosquitoproject.com/our-solution)
    - 5y ago
cletus 5y ago
It's amazing to think of how alien the Earth has been in the past. I think we humans tend to fall victim to this idea that the world we first experienced is how things "are" or "should be" when in reality there's no baseline at all. The EArth has been frozen to the equator (~500M years ago). Sea levels have been higher. They've also been significantly lower and quite recently too (eg there are Neolithic artifacts in the English Channel because that was a land bridge 10-50,000 years ago). My favourite example: for the first 60M years of trees existing, there were no organisms to digest the wood of dead trees. They just sat there or maybe burned. This is where 95% of the coal comes from. I'd really give anything to see some of these periods all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion, which had some truly alien-looking life based on fossil records. It's also why I'm skeptical about doom and gloom predictions of runaway climate change. To be clear, I'm a firm believer that human activity has played and will continue to play a huge part in climate change. This also may be really bad for us. But the Earth will (ultimately) be fine. Something like 99% of the species that have ever existed are extinct now and this will continue to happen with or without human involvement. The article points out that DNA degrades quickly (~500 year half life). That doesn't mean it can't survive for millions of years. It just means very little of it does. Also environmental factors come into play (eg it would probably survive longer in Antarctica, for example). Still, recovering a complete genome from such fragments is all but impossible (also mentioned). Anyway, It's kind of amazing to think that a mosquito bit some creature ~46M years ago and a fossil of it somehow survived until today.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ahevia 5y ago
  While you correctly pointed out that human activity is contributing to climate change. You forgot to mention how unprecedented the rate at which the climate is changing. A process that normally takes tens of thousands of years is happening within a 3-4 human lifetimes. Far too quickly for organisms to adapt. “Doom & gloom” is a defined differently to many people. What exactly do you mean here? Are humans going extinct & Earth is going to become uninhabitable? I certainly don’t think so.
bitwize 5y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
So can there ever be a way of creating a Jurassic park in real life?
- Jaruzel 5y ago
  Nope. Well, not without some extensive DNA meddling, to the extent that it may LOOK like a dinosaur, but it really isn't. Putting aside the DNA issue (see other comments), there's also environmental issues - the atmosphere during prehistoric times (I'm not an expert here, so excuse the vagueness) was far more oxygen-rich that it is now. If a real dinosaur managed to time-travel to our present time, it would die of asphyxiation like a fish out of water.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    I guess if we are meddling with dna we can program them to need less oxygen?
mathrall 5y ago
Eocene would be one of the great land mass formations if ever we decided to move our digital era and advancements in that time.

112 points by areoform 5y ago

egberts1 5y ago

ooooh, one of the older but nicer article of Smithsonian Magazine.

thrtythreeforty 5y ago

I recall the time they found those fossilized mosquitos, and before long they were cloning DNA...

tsouth 5y ago

YarickR2 5y ago

/smack/ 46 million year old virus goes off.

jacquesm 5y ago
It's DNA or RNA will also have degraded substantially.

paulcole 5y ago

Jurassic Park lied to me?

taurusnoises 5y ago

Stoked to show the world what a real pandemic looks like....

Lendal 5y ago

It's an Eocene mosquito. Dinosaurs were already extinct. Notable about this period is it was the last time there was no ice at the poles and water covered a lot more of the earth, as you can see from the map of the Eocene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene which means there were probably a lot of blood-filled mosquitos around during the Eocene. Also from the article: DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood.

mromanuk 5y ago
> Also from the article: DNA has a half-life of ~521 years so there's no DNA left in the blood. Does this mean that the oldest creature that can be “restored” should be dead for less than 521 years old?
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  The article they cite says this might not apply in caves or permafrost for example. It gives ~1.5 million years as an endpoint for readability
  - ummonk 5y ago
    Yeah we've sampled a full horse genome from 700,000 years ago.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  It means that half the DNA is gone after 521 years. After another 521 years, half of the remaining DNA is gone too, leaving 1/4 of the original DNA. Figure that rate of decay into your "restoration" technique to know for how long an organism can be "restored" after being dead. Does your technique require 100% of the DNA? Better catch them on asphalt. Is 50% good enough? You could probably restore Newton. You could do Paul with 6% give or take.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    I don't think that analysis is right. From the original Royal Society paper: > The average DNA half-life within this geographically constrained fossil assemblage was estimated to be 521 years for a 242 bp mtDNA sequence, corresponding to a per nucleotide fragmentation rate (k) of 5.50 × 10–6 per year. If there is a 50% chance that a 242 base pair sequence has a break in 500 years, you will be able to recover the full sequence in way more than 50% of 500 year old samples. First, you have many copies of the same DNA fragment in a macroscopic drop of blood, so some will not have a break. Second, even if it's older and all strands have at least one break, you can look at a bunch of half strands or tenth strands and infer the complete sequence. Likewise, if I had a thousand copies of a book where each copy had a few destroyed pages, it would not be hard to reconstitute the entire contents of the books. I think the above rate of decay would allow for recovery of the sequence in a sample after probably tens of thousands of years. This is why mammoths, but not dinosaurs, are typically the targets for brining back extinct mammals.

cutler 5y ago

So those little ****ers have been spreading their misery for at least 46 million years. There's no hope for us lot then.

epicureanideal 5y ago
I definitely think we should get rid of mosquitos while we have the chance. Imagine if civilization crumbles, and our descendants, huddled in caves and trying to find enough food to eat, are all getting diseases from these things, and people look back at us and say "but they thought it wasn't ethical to kill mosquitos".
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  I live in Alaska, famous for its mosquitoes as well as megafauna like bears, caribou, moose, wolves, migratory birds, fish, seals, whales etc. I often wonder if those mosquitoes don’t fulfill some strange yet essential role in that beautiful ecosystem’s continuation. Would love to hear that no, we can safely eliminate them and all the other cool and cuddly ones will be fine. But with my luck… Really though, I’d like to see better medical technologies to deal with illnesses.
  - nfc 5y ago
    Couldn't we run experiments to discover whether they really have this role? Like for example choosing an island with mosquitoes (and far enough from other lands as to not be rapidly repopulated) eliminating them there and seeing what the effect is in the ecosystem? I wonder if something like this has ever been tried.
    - interestica 5y ago
      I think they're deploying these (https://www.oxitec.com/en/our-technology https://www.oxitec.com/en/our-technology) in the Florida Keys (https://www.keysmosquitoproject.com/our-solution https://www.keysmosquitoproject.com/our-solution)
  - 5y ago

cletus 5y ago

It's amazing to think of how alien the Earth has been in the past. I think we humans tend to fall victim to this idea that the world we first experienced is how things "are" or "should be" when in reality there's no baseline at all. The EArth has been frozen to the equator (~500M years ago). Sea levels have been higher. They've also been significantly lower and quite recently too (eg there are Neolithic artifacts in the English Channel because that was a land bridge 10-50,000 years ago). My favourite example: for the first 60M years of trees existing, there were no organisms to digest the wood of dead trees. They just sat there or maybe burned. This is where 95% of the coal comes from. I'd really give anything to see some of these periods all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion, which had some truly alien-looking life based on fossil records. It's also why I'm skeptical about doom and gloom predictions of runaway climate change. To be clear, I'm a firm believer that human activity has played and will continue to play a huge part in climate change. This also may be really bad for us. But the Earth will (ultimately) be fine. Something like 99% of the species that have ever existed are extinct now and this will continue to happen with or without human involvement. The article points out that DNA degrades quickly (~500 year half life). That doesn't mean it can't survive for millions of years. It just means very little of it does. Also environmental factors come into play (eg it would probably survive longer in Antarctica, for example). Still, recovering a complete genome from such fragments is all but impossible (also mentioned). Anyway, It's kind of amazing to think that a mosquito bit some creature ~46M years ago and a fossil of it somehow survived until today.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ahevia 5y ago
While you correctly pointed out that human activity is contributing to climate change. You forgot to mention how unprecedented the rate at which the climate is changing. A process that normally takes tens of thousands of years is happening within a 3-4 human lifetimes. Far too quickly for organisms to adapt. “Doom & gloom” is a defined differently to many people. What exactly do you mean here? Are humans going extinct & Earth is going to become uninhabitable? I certainly don’t think so.

bitwize 5y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago

So can there ever be a way of creating a Jurassic park in real life?

Jaruzel 5y ago
Nope. Well, not without some extensive DNA meddling, to the extent that it may LOOK like a dinosaur, but it really isn't. Putting aside the DNA issue (see other comments), there's also environmental issues - the atmosphere during prehistoric times (I'm not an expert here, so excuse the vagueness) was far more oxygen-rich that it is now. If a real dinosaur managed to time-travel to our present time, it would die of asphyxiation like a fish out of water.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  I guess if we are meddling with dna we can program them to need less oxygen?

mathrall 5y ago

Eocene would be one of the great land mass formations if ever we decided to move our digital era and advancements in that time.