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rsc2 t1_iw9qh99 wrote

Reply to comment by reddit455 in How do we have more woolly mammoth DNA than dodo DNA if woolly mammoths died off thousands of years ago and dodos only died off a few hundred? by Memer9456

What about museum specimens?

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deadmeatsandwich t1_iw9shli wrote

Any specimen that is going to be for display, is pretty much just skin and feathers on a stuffed framework. It will have likely been treated with harsh chemicals in order to preserve it, which will destroy any DNA beyond use.

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cowbirdy t1_iwbhtjp wrote

This is true of old bird study skins which often used arsenic to prevent bugs from eating them, but modern study skins don't use any harsh chemicals in the preservation process - just cotton and sunlight. Sometimes dawn dish soap will be used if the skin is particularly dirty.

Also even historical bird skins don't tend to have large amounts of arsenic on the foot pads which is where DNA is often sampled from due to its thickness and its remarkably successful compared to other taxa. Though the addition of arsenic does inhibit PCR success,its not found at a particularly high volume on the feet of historical study skins.

Here's a link to one reference, but I'm also just speaking from experience preparing study skins and picking up info from there.

This isn't to contradict the fact that there is less dodo DNA than mammoth - but preserved bird skins are some of the easiest to extract DNA from, compared to ethanol preserved specimens (common for herps and insects) and mammalian taxidermy.

I think your point from another comment about how mammoths were essentially frozen is the primary reason that there is more usable DNA.

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lookmeat t1_iwcr0ks wrote

Yup, the thing is, even with preserved you still have to contend with the natural decay of DNA. It's a half life of 521 years. This doesn't mean half the DNA is gone, but half the bonds. So after a couple centuries all you'd see are a bunch of pieces of DNA that you have to, somehow, assemble in the right order, that's a puzzle on a different level. The only way to slow down there process is to freeze which, Uber right conditions, can extend the half life by thousands of years.

Also wooly mammoths are not that old. The pyramids where built when there where still mammoths. But that depends what mammoth we are talking about.

And that's the other reason. When we talk about mammoths, we are talking about many species, that lived across all the north of America and Eurasia for around 5 million years. When we talk about dodos, it's a species that only lived in an island (not Madagascar but way smaller Mauritius) over who knows how long (their branch splits 25 million years ago, but they are so different from their closest relative species that it's hard to define when the actual dodo, vs predecessor species, evolves) but it may not be that much. So the chances that you have pieces of dodos that happened to be in a place that preserve them well enough is much lower than that of any mammoths'.

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Admetus t1_iwazhnj wrote

Could all damaged DNA be sort of correlated to find the correct DNA sequence? Or did the chemicals break DNA chains to a point beyond recognition?

Ooh found the DNA 🧬 emoticon lol

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EntangledPhoton82 t1_iwb8cw4 wrote

Suppose you found pieces a c t g… How could you know if the correct order is actg, atcg, agct,… ? It would be virtually impossible.

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Hotarg t1_iwc0mx8 wrote

Take a newspaper, put it in a blender, run it on smoothie for a minute. Now tell me the sports scores.

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EngFarm t1_iw9rzuv wrote

Supposed stuffed dodos seen in museums around the world today have in fact been made from feathers of other birds, many of the older ones by the British taxidermist Rowland Ward's company.[107]

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akeean t1_iwapdsu wrote

You'd need ~500x the museum specimen of dodos to get even remotely close to a single mammoth find in mass.

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mrbananas t1_iwc146g wrote

The last dodo specimen was thrown into a furnace. Only the head and foot were saved before completely being burned

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atomfullerene t1_iwcnb5t wrote

Until recently, museums weren't particularly trying to preserve DNA. Sometimes you can get DNA from museum specimens, but they aren't specifically great for it (still better than nothing, though).

But for dodos specifically, there are only 2 or 3 specimins in the world that were collected when the species was alive, and only one of those has any soft tissue

https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2013/09/19/the-best-natural-history-specimen-in-the-world/

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