Beth Shapiro

So they sound like that.

I don't know.

Who knows?

Anyway, they showed that you could get DNA from this skin.

And everybody was like, that is the coolest thing that I've heard in a long time.

That must mean we can bring dinosaurs back to life.

And everybody started racing to get the oldest and coolest DNA.

And so there were papers in the best journals of science that never published anything that's wrong ever, ever, that said, look, here's dinosaur DNA.

And look, here's DNA from a myosin-aged leaf.

And look, here's this.

And all of it is crap.

We now know.

In fact, the first dinosaur DNA sequences that were published, if you took them at the time and you typed them into the Internet and you compared them to the earliest of what is today this big repository of all DNA sequences of everything that's ever been sequenced.

What came back was a close match to a bird.

We now know, because there's more DNA sequences there, that it was a chicken, an exact match to a chicken.

And some investigative work found that the excavation team who'd been working on those bones had fried chicken for lunch every day.

It's like greasy fingers on your dinosaur fossils.

And look, now we have ancient DNA.

That would be the early 90s.

Well, the idea of DNA is much older than that.