The skulls of two juvenile duck-billed dinosaurs (Hypacrosaurus stebingeri), shelved after their discovery in the 1980s, have something that looks a lot like DNA. There are many tiny circular structures at the back - some linked together, others standing apart, frozen as they were when the animals fossilized. Several of these circles contained a dark material reminiscent of a nucleus, and others held tangled coils resembling chromosomes.
“I’m not even willing to call it DNA because I’m cautious, and I don’t want to overstate the results,” said the team’s molecular paleontologist Mary Schweitzer. “There is something in these cells that is chemically consistent with and responds like DNA.”
