The preservation of bone or bioapatite over geologic time has presented paleobiologists
with long-standing and formidable questions. Namely, to elucidate the mechanisms …

The world's increasing population and shortage of food and feed is creating an urgently for
us to look for new protein sources from waste products like keratinous waste. Poor …

Melanin is a ubiquitous biological pigment found in bacteria, fungi, plants, and animals. It
has a diverse range of ecological and biochemical functions, including display, evasion …

Vertebrate hard tissues consist of mineral crystallites within a proteinaceous scaffold that
normally degrades post-mortem. Here we show, however, that decalcification of Mesozoic …

Iridescent feather colors involved in displays of many extant birds are produced by
nanoscale arrays of melanin-containing organelles (melanosomes). Data relevant to the …

Abstract Fossils from the “Jehol Biota” have been studied for nearly 90 years, and the term
“Jehol Biota” has been extensively used and is well known today, largely thanks to the …

Fossilized organic remains are important sources of information because they provide a
unique form of biological and evolutionary information, and have the long-term potential for …

Fossil feathers, hairs and eyes are regularly preserved as carbonized traces comprised of
masses of micrometre-sized bodies that are spherical, oblate or elongate in shape. For a …

Sequence data from biomolecules such as DNA and proteins, which provide critical
information for evolutionary studies, have been assumed to be forever outside the reach of …

The persistence of original soft tissues in Mesozoic fossil bone is not explained by current
chemical degradation models. We identified iron particles (goethite-αFeO (OH)) associated …