ArticleScientific reports2021
Molecular preservation in mammoth bone and variation based on burial environment.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 12 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis-GC-MS and supervised machine learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Fossilized dinosaur cells that defied the ravages of time - 20 years since a key discovery.Nature · 2025Article
- A new non-destructive method to decipher the origin of organic matter in fossils using Raman spectroscopy.RSC advances · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biomolecules preserved in fossils are expanding our understanding of the biology and evolution of ancient animals. Molecular taphonomy seeks to understand how these biomolecules are preserved and how they can be interpreted. So far, few studies on molecular preservation have considered burial context to understand its impact on preservation or the potentially complementary information from multiple biomolecular classes. Here, we use mass spectrometry and other analytical techniques to detect the remains of proteins and lipids within intact fossil mammoth bones of different ages and varied depositional setting. By combining these approaches, we demonstrate that endogenous amino acids, amides and lipids can preserve well in fossil bone. Additionally, these techniques enable us to examine variation in preservation based on location within the bone, finding dense cortical bone better preserves biomolecules, both by slowing the rate of degradation and limiting the extent of exogenous contamination. Our dataset demonstrates that biomolecule loss begins early, is impacted by burial environment and temperature, and that both exogenous and endogenous molecular signals can be both present and informative in a single fossil.
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Registered trials
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