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Honest question - what has stopped us from bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life? Which variable in the equation is unsolved?
by shreyansj 6y ago
Honest question - what has stopped us from bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life? Which variable in the equation is unsolved?
- simcop2387 6y agoDNA. There's no recoverable DNA to be discovered after that long, pretty much regardless of how it might have been preserved.
- eru 6y agoFor one, we don't have their DNA. See eg https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosaurs-back.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosa...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoOn top of what the article says, even if we had pristine dinosaur DNA, the way we clone things is through a living host - so whatever we'd clone would be half-dinosaur, half-cow, or half-whatever animal volunteered a womb/egg.
- devnonymous 6y agoI get what you're saying but it would more likely be half-Dino, half-chicken :-) As an aside though, wasn't there a place to reintroduce wooly mammoths? Wonder what happened to that.
- simcop2387 6y agoNot necessarily half. There'd definitely be some sharing but when we clone things we replace the genome in the egg that's used. That said it'll share mitochondrial and other things during development
- TheBigSalad 6y agoFrogs my bro
- thdrdt 6y agoThe youngest dinosaur fossil found is estimated to be 65 million years old. The oldest DNA sample is estimated to be 800,000 years old. So we simply don't have DNA from a dinosaur.
- crtasm 6y agoOn this topic, I really enjoy talks from Jack Horner. https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_from_a_chicken https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fr...