Curtin University researchers have analysed samples of owl regurgitation excavated from caves 280 years ago, extracting DNA fragments to identify different species.
The study was undertaken by an international team led by Morten Allentoft, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences.
The researchers also studied one of the oldest collections of ancient animal bones in the world collected during cave excavations done in Brazil in the 1840s by Danish naturalist, P.W. Lund, who was famous for his description of giant prehistoric animals.
Researcher, Frederik Seersholm said Lund decided to donate his entire fossil collection to the King of Denmark and in 1845 hundreds of wooden boxes of the bones were shipped to Copenhagen.
“Unfortunately for the collection, the king died in 1848 shortly after it arrived and the vast majority of the more than 100,000 ancient bone fragments were never formally described — until now,” Dr Seersholm said.
”In this study we show that even though the collection is old, and has had a very ‘rough’ life with long periods of terrible storage locations, DNA is still present in the bones.”
Professor Allentoft said the findings could suggest that the negative effects of poor storage conditions were negligible compared with the long-term DNA degradation that bone specimens undergo in the environment before excavation.
“With the identification of well-preserved DNA in even the smallest of bones from the collection, we now know that its potential for exciting ancient DNA research is much greater than anyone anticipated,” Professor Allentoft said.
“There is without doubt a great deal of information to be retrieved from the fragmented bones of P.W. Lund’s collection, and it is likely that the collection holds important future discoveries of extinct South American species.”
