Board Thread:Fossil Fuels/@comment-3213993-20140706233628/@comment-3213993-20160119005018

Bad news. On New Years Day I did BLAST searches of purported Brachylophosaurus blood vessel proteins described by Schweitzer in the December paper "Mass spectrometry and antibody-based characterization of blood vessels from Brachylophosaurus canadensis". As it turns out, when invertebrates are included in the BLAST search query (not done in Schweitzer's paper) against the individual "dinosaur" peptides, it turns out that at least one actin and the myosin proteins are closer to insect proteins than to vertebrate proteins. Along with the mouse-identical sequence in the original Brachylophosaurus collagen paper, this bolsters the case for contamination.

I emailed one of the authors and got no reply, but I emailed a critic of Schweitzer's studies and he said that from my results and description of her paper it seems clear that her team is only seeing what they want to see, with a preconception that proteins can be recovered from dinosaur bones and working backwards to confirm this, the opposite of good science. To me, this makes sense.