Scientists at Rockefeller University have reconstructed the light-sensing rhodopsin protein from the ancestors of dinosaurs. It suggests that dinosaurs may have been well-adapted to seeing in the dark. Belinda S.W. Chang, Ph.D., first author and research assistant professor at Rockefeller, used existing databases and sophisticated statistical methods to infer the most likely DNA sequences that the ancestral archosaur would have had for its rhodopsin.

“From the databases, we pulled rhodopsin gene sequences for such animals as dogs, rats, cows, birds, teleost fish, eels and amphibians. Then we aligned them,” says Chang. “Using our knowledge of how these vertebrates are related to each other, the sequence alignment and a model of how often certain types of genetic changes occur over time, we calculated the most likely gene sequence.”