My interest in paleontology, and in particular the search for DNA from ancient and extinct organisms, began over a decade ago as an undergraduate majoring in history and philosophy at North Carolina State University. As part of my studies, I was required to take a science elective. I chose the course “Dinosaurian World” because, like many other students, I thought it would be a walk in the park. Dr. Mary Schweitzer taught the course, which was anything but easy. I loved it, though. I spent the next several years digging up dinosaurs in the badlands of Montana, prepping fossils in the lab, and taking a number of other classes on dinosaur anatomy, physiology, and evolution.
After class one day, I asked Dr. Schweitzer a question. I had seen on television that one of the major science channels was airing an upcoming episode on a scientist who had discovered evidence of ancient proteins from a dinosaur. I was planning on watching it but I wanted to know if she knew of this work, and if so, what she thought of it. Ancient dinosaur proteins? Really? She smiled and said to watch it first and that we could talk about it later. So, I did and was mortified when I realized that Dr. Schweitzer was the star of the show, the scientist suggesting she had extracted evidence of ancient proteins from a 60-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.
Dr. Schweitzer’s findings, published across top-tier academic journals from Science to Nature, were nothing short of extraordinary. As such, they were quickly and frequently followed by media attention and public speculation. As I learned more about this work, I learned that she was criticized just as much, if not more, than she was celebrated for these pioneering efforts in molecular paleontology. Since the early 1990s, she had been investigating the limits of molecular preservation in fossils as a student studying with Jack Horner, a maverick dinosaur paleontologist and scientific consultant on Steven Spielberg’s cinematic production of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. Over the years, she had acquired loyal supporters as well as vehement skeptics who resisted the idea that molecules, whether proteins or DNA, could survive intact for millions of years.
My exposure to this paleontological controversy, and the very public nature of it, is what inspired this book. Consequently, the book is a historical examination of the search for molecules from fossils, specifically the search for DNA from fossils, as it progressed from an idea of science fiction into a research reality from the early 1980s to today. In these pages, I explore the controversy and celebrity that not only followed it but actually came to direct and define, in quite remarkable ways, the formation of a new scientific field, now widely known by both the scientific community and broader public as the field of “ancient DNA research.”