Proteins over 20 million years old revolutionise evolutionary studies
A new study, published in the prestigious journal “Nature” on July 9, 2025, describes the extraction and sequencing of ancient enamel proteins from a fossilised rhinoceros tooth dating back 21-24 million years to the Lower Miocene.
This extraordinary feat, obtained from a fossil found in the Canadian High Arctic, extends the time scale of recoverable protein sequences and evolutionary information tenfold over the oldest known DNA.
This research marks a crucial moment for palaeoproteomics, the study of ancient proteins. Although ancient proteins have been found in fossils from the middle to upper Miocene (around the last 10 million years), obtaining sufficiently detailed sequences for robust reconstructions of evolutionary relationships was previously limited to samples no older than 4 million years. This new study significantly expands that time window, demonstrating the extraordinary potential of proteins to persist over vast geological time scales under the right conditions.
The project was led by Ryan Sinclair Paterson and directed by Enrico Cappellini of the University of Copenhagen. Within this project, the contribution of Gabriele Scorrano (University of Tor Vergata), Raffaele Sardella (Department of Earth Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome) and Luca Bellucci (Museum of Geology and Palaeontology, University of Florence) was fundamental: they provided and analysed a rhinoceros tooth specimen of about 400,000 years ago, from the archaeo-palaeontological site of Fontana Ranuccio ( in the Frosinone area, Latium).
At this site, along with a rich fauna, some of the oldest finds of the genus Homo in Italy were found. The find acted as an intermediate reference between the more recent samples (medieval specimens) and the much older one analysed in this study, offering a direct comparison on protein preservation over time.
References:
Paterson, R. S., Mackie, M., Capobianco, A., Heckeberg, N. S., Fraser, D., Demarchi, B., Munir, F., Patramanis, I., Ramos-Madrigal, J., Liu, S., Ramsøe, A. D., Dickinson, M. R., Baldreki, C., Gilbert, M., Sardella, R., Bellucci, L., Scorrano, G., Leonardi, M., Manica, A., Racimo, F., Willerslev, E., Penkman, K. E. H., Olsen, J. V., MacPhee, R. D. E., Rybczynski, N., Höhna, S., Cappellini, E., Phylogenetically informative proteins from an Early Miocene rhinocerotid. Nature, https://doi.org/10.1038/
Further Information:
Raffaele Sardella
Department of Earth Sciences