Needless to say, this "news item" was a complete hoax, albeit a very entertaining one. The original Jurassic Park made it all look so easy: in a remote laboratory, a team of scientists extracts DNA from the guts of hundred-million-year-old mosquitoes petrified in amber the idea being that these pesky bugs, of course, feasted on dinosaur blood before they died.
The dinosaur DNA is combined with frog DNA an odd choice, considering that frogs are amphibians rather than reptiles , and then, by some mysterious process that's presumably too difficult for the average moviegoer to follow, the result is a living, breathing, completely inaccurately portrayed Dilophosaurus straight out of the Jurassic period. In real life, though, cloning a dinosaur would be a much, much more difficult undertaking. That hasn't prevented an eccentric Australian billionaire, Clive Palmer, from recently announcing his plans to clone dinosaurs for a real-life, down-under Jurassic Park.
One presumes that Palmer made his announcement in the same spirit that Donald Trump initially tested the waters for his presidential bid--as a way of attracting attention and headlines. Is Palmer one shrimp short of a full barbie, or has he somehow mastered the scientific challenge of dinosaur cloning?
Let's take a closer look at what's involved. DNA--the molecule that encodes all of an organism's genetic information--has a notoriously complex, and easily breakable, structure consisting of millions of "base pairs" strung together in a specific sequence.
The fact is that it's extremely difficult to extract a full strand of intact DNA even from a 10,year-old Woolly Mammoth frozen in permafrost; imagine what the odds are for a dinosaur, even an extremely well-fossilized one, that has been encased in sediment for over 65 million years! Jurassic Park had the right idea, DNA-extraction-wise; the trouble is that dinosaur DNA would completely degrade, even in the relatively isolated confines of a mosquito's fossilized tummy, over geologic stretches of time.
The best we can reasonably hope for--and even that's a long shot--is to recover scattered and incomplete fragments of a particular dinosaur's DNA, accounting for perhaps one or two percent of its entire genome. Then, the hand-waving argument goes, we might be able to reconstruct these DNA fragments by splicing in strands of genetic code obtained from the modern descendants of dinosaurs , the birds.
But which species of bird? How much of its DNA? And, without having any idea what a complete Diplodocus genome looks like, how would we know where to insert the dinosaur DNA remnants? Ready for more disappointment? An intact dinosaur genome, even if one were ever miraculously to be discovered or engineered, wouldn't be sufficient, by itself, to clone a living, breathing dinosaur.
You can't just inject the DNA into, say, an unfertilized chicken egg, then sit back and wait for your Apatosaurus to hatch. The fact is that most vertebrates need to gestate in an extremely specific biological environment, and, at least for a short period of time, in a living body even a fertilized chicken egg spends a day or two in the mother hen's oviduct before it's laid. So what would be the ideal "foster mom" for a cloned dinosaur?
Fossilized leaves and trees have been found which contain remnants of DNA, and tiny remnants of DNA from insects trapped in amber have been extracted, but the entire DNA sequence has never been observed in fossils.
Recent laboratory studies Nature , vol. Without the repair mechanism of a living cell, it self-destructs at a rapid rate. Under even the most favorable conditions, it could not remain beyond 10, years or so at least this is what true scientific observations show, as opposed to scientific speculations or science fiction. The last question: How old are these fossils, and how old is the "dinosaur blood? And dinosaurs? All scientists whose articles I have read have agreed that the idea of dinosaur DNA remaining intact in a complete-enough state for cloning will always remain a fairy tale.
No advances in technology are likely ever to bridge that gap. In this model, the fossils aren't so old, and were rapidly buried—conditions optimum for preservation. Even post-flood fossils aren't so old, but complete DNA molecules would still be extremely unlikely.
So, in order to clone dinosaurs, we need perfectly preserved and complete dinosaur DNA which we don't have , and a living mother dinosaur to provide the living egg cell which we also don't have and aren't going to have. The point is, don't lose any sleep over cloned dinosaurs! You might be more concerned with the scientific community. How long will they continue to allow Hollywood to use fairytale just to promote evolution? The oldest recovered and authenticated DNA from bone belongs to a ,year-old horse from the frozen Klondike gold fields in Yukon, Canada, said Shapiro, who co-wrote a study on it in the journal Nature.
Scientists have proposed that DNA can survive as long as a million years, but definitely not more than 5 million or 6 million years, Schweitzer said. That's woefully short of 65 million years ago, when the asteroid slammed into Earth and killed the nonavian dinosaurs. However, more experiments are needed to determine how long, and in what conditions, DNA can survive, Schweitzer said. Moreover, don't expect a "Jurassic Park" twist to work.
In the blockbuster, scientists find dinosaur DNA in an ancient mosquito caught in amber. But amber, it turns out, does not preserve DNA well.
The researchers couldn't find any "convincing evidence for the preservation of ancient DNA" in either of the two copal samples they studied, and they concluded that "DNA is not preserved in this type of material," they wrote in the study. They added, "Our results raise further doubts about claims of DNA extraction from fossil insects in amber, many millions of years older than copal.
Related: What if a giant asteroid had not wiped out the dinosaurs? If researchers choose to study the DNA lurking in dinosaur bone, it will be difficult to say whether it was dinosaurian in nature, the experts said. In contrast, the dinosaurs' living relatives are birds. But birds evolved out of the theropod line — a group of bipedal, largely carnivorous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor.
Other dinosaur groups — including the hadrosaurs the duck-billed dinosaurs , the ceratopsians such as Triceratops , the stegosaurs and the ankylosaurs — do not have living relatives. For the sake of argument, let's say that researchers found fully sequenced dinosaur DNA. This means that researchers would have an entire genome, including the so-called junk DNA and the viral DNA that's incorporated itself into the dinosaur's genetic code.
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