The DNA in these eggshells was never going to survive 50,000 years in the hot sands of the Australian desert. So, the researchers turned to proteins and AlphaFold, to help fill in the gaps.
AlphaFold is an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.
It took a genuinely multidisciplinary team including specialists in palaeoproteomics, bird genetics, archaeology and more to crack the eggshell code and answer the question of what led to the demise of the thunderbird.
Links and further reading:
Find more AlphaFold stories at
Read the full paper by Beatrice, Josefin, Matthew and colleagues in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Access the AlphaFold database
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