Artificial intelligence provides modern tool to study extinct species from 50,000 years ago
Scientists Beatrice Demarchi from the University of Turin, Josefin Stiller from the University of Copenhagen, and Matthew Collins from the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen share their story of how AlphaFold came to be.
Could burn marks on old eggshells explain the disappearance of the giant flightless bird Genyornis newtoni? This ostrich-sized “thunderbird,” nicknamed the “demon duck of doom” because of its enormous head, vanished from Australia’s fossil record about 50,000 years ago. The discovery of burnt eggshells led scientists, including a team led by Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado Boulder, to hypothesize that their extinction was caused by early humans eating their eggs.
But the evidence was inconclusive. The burned eggshells seemed too slender to have come from such a huge bird. Could they have come from something much smaller, more like a huge turkey?
To determine whether Genyornis died out due to human interference, scientists had to prove that the burned shell fragments were indeed from eggs laid by Genyornis. That led to a modern problem: The DNA in those eggshells had been lost over the course of 50,000 years in the balmy sands of the Australian desert. Instead, scientists turned to proteins and artificial intelligence to assist fill in the gaps.
It took a truly interdisciplinary team, including experts in old fossil proteins, bird genetics, archaeology, and more, to crack the eggshell code and figure out what led to the thunderbird’s demise. Spoiler alert: the evidence suggests that those obviously tasty massive eggs did indeed belong to Genyornis.
Read the full article by Beatrice, Josefin, Matthew and colleagues at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.