Would it be possible to bring back the dinosaurs?

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How much could be accomplished by reverse engineering birds which are the latter day descendants of the dinosaurs.

ruveyn

Shot answer: not much. Longer answer: Imagine trying to reverse engineer a human from a chimpanzee, or a beaver from a rat. There are a pretty huge number of possible combinations. We'd need one heck of a lot more knowledge on DNA before anything like that would be possible (and I do mean a heck of a lot lol). And even then, just having the DNA doesn't produce viable offspring, you still need a way to convert from pure DNA to baby dinosaur (although I will admit, there are already potentially viable suggestions out there for this process)

Chimps are not the fore runners of humans nor are rats the fore runners of beavers.

ruveyn

That same pbs show that aired in the wake of Jurassic Park talked about that- mining the genome of the birds to get at dinosaur DNA.

They concluded that at best you might turn a bird into a walking "collection of dinosaur parts, but it wouldnt be a dinosaur."

I guess it just isnt meant to be.
Maybe thats a good thing!

I also wondered about reverse engineering of DNA, but if we don't know the actual genetic sequences of dinos, then we wouldn't know what to engineer towards. I think birds probably have a very high percentage of the same DNA as dino's. Don't forget some dino's had feathers.

Now, in geology, many things about earth's history are sleuthed out by combining many different clues from many different processes. For example, you can look at something as apparently uncomplicated as a slide of sandstone under a microscope, and determine where the grains came from, what the are made of, how far they traveled, how old they are, what amount of stress they were subjected to which direction that stress came from, maybe the nature of that stress, what sort of chemical change they were subjected to, and possibly many other things, depending on what you are looking at. This is JUST by looking at the slide under a geological microscope. It is a complicated science which combines many disciplines and uses sound logic to apply the clues and arrive at conclusions. This is used to work out the age of the earth, what is inside it, and stuff like reconstructing the tectonic history of the planet.
Think about it. How could they know what temp the earth used to be, where the continents used to be located, etc.

So why did I bring this up? Well, I have always wondered about the 'junk' DNA, which apparently they recently began to see is maybe not so junky after all. I have long wondered whether the 'history' of the DNA was somehow embedded in the DNA itself. This is of course wild speculation, but imagine the following:
You have species "A", which evolved from species "B" which evolved from species "C". You could reconstruct the anatomy of the extinct species, and probably get it quite correct, using just the bones, and the geological clues about the environment it lived in, and the well studied and hopefully well understood principles of anatomy of extant similar species. Believe it or not, a single tooth from an animal gives an incredible amount of info about it's overall anatomy and lifestyle. Then you could 'undo' the genetic changes required to get from phenotype "A" to phenotype "B". If it used to be taller, then if we understand what 'tall' genes look like as compared to the 'short' genes, then that part of the genome could be rewound. Feature by feature, we could eventually learn how to go backwards. There may be some as yet undiscovered processes that dictate how the changes take place. In physics, understanding gravitational acceleration, Newton's laws of motion, heat transference etc, can go a very long way in helping to work out things that happened a long time ago eg Big Bang.
Maybe genetics has similar mechanisms that are predictable and reliable. Maybe combining them with all of the other clues geology gives us, can allow us to figure it out?

But I have watched enough Sci Fi to also question that it would be a good idea. My biggest concern would be triggering some sort of 'runaway' evolution, especially where microbes are concerned. We could theoretically start something quite nasty.

whether or not it is possible was the question that is the subject of this thread.

i think it is not possible because even the most sheltered DNA will be blown to pieces by cosmic rays over time. (cosmic rays are electromagnetic rays that have a frequency that is too high to measure of name)

cosmic rays are of such a high frequency that they pass through the earth unhindered. nothing can deflect the cosmic rays with the highest frequencies (which we have not yet discovered a way to even measure) and it is rays like that that obliterate most of the dna sequence no matter how deeply it is buried, or how cold it is, given enough time.


dinosaurs were not "reptiles". dinosaurs did not eat men because men did not exist then. there were no dinosaurs that could run as fast as a truck, because trucks were not yet invented when they were alive.
you seem relatively boring and predictable to me.

there is no way that dna can survive for 65 million years. and there is no way to reverse engineer any current dna because no one knows what the destroyed dna' sequence actually was .

maybe in a thousand years we may see real tyrannosaurs but it will not happen in my life.

Would you want a velocoraptor in your back yard?

ruveyn

Modern birds(avian dinosaurs) descend from dinosaurs(non avian dinosaurs). This means that the genes in birds DNA has the potential of creating a dinosaur.
So it should be teoretically possible to turn a chickenegg inta a dinosauregg.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVXdEOiCw8[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIP7JaYv9OU[/youtube]
I am not against this, as long as we don't mix the DNA of the dinosaur with the DNA from African frogs that is capable of changing gender.

This may interest some participants in this discussion.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zei ... 77634.html

He's a Geneticist from Harvard and is involved in Synthetic Biology.

Hmmmm...

So according to Jack Horner if we just tweeked a couple genes of a chicken- it would have a long tail, have claws on it forlimbs, and jaws full of teeth!

A mad scientist working alone might succeed- and might start raising some dino-chickens..

One escapes- and starts to seek out Frank Purdue, and Colonel Sanders- to exact.... REVENGE!

i often imagine what a tyrannosaur may have looked like and how it behaved.
i do not think that they always had their tail waving around in the air as current impressions of them depict. it would take too much energy to be perpetually balanced on the fulcrum of their feet.
many times when i look out of my window, i imagine a tyrannosaur outside, and always i imagine it as standing erect with it's tail firmly on the ground.

i am disappointed that my life did not include a witnessing of dinosaurs.

What he said.

From what I've read, DNA is thought to be too degraded by the time it is a million years old that it would be pretty much impossible to sequence it.

The you must be doubly disappoint you never witnessed the First Light from our Sun when the compressed mass of gas and dust at the center of a gas cloud commenced nuclear fusion.

ruveyn

Just yesterday I had a conversation with a Molecular Paleobiologist, who had tried to reconstruct the Dodo genome from preserved specimens. He didn't really explain how, but the vast majority of the dodos they checked had their DNA "corrupted" by pigeon DNA. It turned out that the most usable one was the first one they tried.

That's a species we've tried to preserve quite hard that has gone extinct in historical times. Now think how difficult it would be with species that died out when mammals were only just starting.

Everything on TV is true so Jurassic Park is true too

but fox is still faux. [visual humor]