Chemistry found the marker compound treated as diagnostic of ambergris in nine of the eleven samples, a different nine from the nine museum specimens, while sperm whale DNA turned up in seven, and the authors recommend both methods while ranking the chemistry first.
Nine museum specimens catalogued as ambergris had all passed the traditional hot needle test, and chemical profiling then found no ambrein in two of them, one of which held the highest DNA concentration in the study and yielded no detectable sperm whale DNA on either marker, while the plant marker returned 330 reads, all of them from a coastal dune plant
Science Blog Editorial Team