Would it be possible to bring back the dinosaurs?

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Jitro
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24 Jan 2013, 5:27 am

Is the jurassic park idea entirely fiction?



ruveyn
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24 Jan 2013, 9:55 am

Jitro wrote:
Is the jurassic park idea entirely fiction?


It is plausible fiction. Clones have been created by the process shown in the movie (e.g. Dolly the Sheep).

There is no way to get complete dinosaur DNA so the idea of cloning a dino is fiction. But it is not absurd or impossible fiction.

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24 Jan 2013, 10:41 am

As said, its possible...but we have no dino DNA to do the process.

Would be interesting if we came across some, but that is very unlikely.


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24 Jan 2013, 11:06 am

I wouldn't say it isn't impossible, but I would say it shouldn't be done. How would the dinosaurs survive in today's world anyway? The climate and food sources are very different now. I heard an elephant eats around 500 lbs. of food every day, can you imagine how much an apatosaurus would eat? And there could be diseases or germs that could kill the dinos because their immune systems wouldn't know how to fight them. I think we should be trying to save animal species that are almost extinct now and it's all our fault that they are, instead of bringing back a species that's been extinct millions of years before humans ever came.



Marybird
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24 Jan 2013, 12:26 pm

I know this sounds crazy, but I've had this fantasy of recreating extinct species of humans from their DNA. But then they would have all the same problems that Lostonearth pointed out plus possibly face a lot of discrimination from modern humans



naturalplastic
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24 Jan 2013, 3:35 pm

Back when the movie first came out PBS had a whole TV show devoted to the science of trying to clone, care, and feed, dinosaurs.

The cloneing part was the biggest problem. They discussed different ways it might be done. In the novel/movie they did it through extracting dinosaur blood out of the bellies of jurassic mosquitoes found in trapped in amber. A theoretical possibility but not really doable. That dont really have alot of dinosaur blood in fossil mosquitoes. That and any other way would be theoretically possible but extremely unlikely to work. Its hard to get the whole genome of even one dinosaur species out of a fossil today. Much less the genomes of the dozens of species needed to recreate a jurassic ecosystem.

If you wanted to play God and bring back extinct species- I would try species that we humans ourselves have caused to become extinct in historic times- the dodos, the tasmanian wolves, the passenger pigeons and the like., which went extinct only the last centuries or even decades. Many tropical frogs were wiped out only in the lifetimes of folks born in the eighties. It would be far easier to get the DNA of creatures like those frogs than from even the most recent dinosaur. And rearing the frogs would be alot easier.

Maybe, if you're ambitious, you might then try to bring back the Mammoths (or other ice age fauna) from little more than 12 thousand years ago. With all the bones theyve pulled out of the Labray tar pits -maybe a "An Ice Age Park"(instead of a Jurassic Park) would not be totally unfeasible.

Maybe you could even clone a Neanderthal Man, or a Denosovian Woman!

But bringing back a dinosaur from beyond their 63 million year old graves is really beyond the feasible-even though it might be theoretically possible.



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24 Jan 2013, 3:53 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Maybe you could even clone a Neanderthal Man, or a Denosovian Woman!

That would be awsome!



auntblabby
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25 Jan 2013, 1:19 am

bring back the dodo! Image



GoonSquad
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25 Jan 2013, 10:00 am

Marybird wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Maybe you could even clone a Neanderthal Man, or a Denosovian Woman!

That would be awsome!


I've read a few papers that suggest that is very possible.

I don't know how ethical or awesome it would be. We're talking about effectively producing a sapient lab rat. I don't think that is a good idea.

I'm sure there WILL be Mammoths cloned eventually... That's cool. I'd eat one. :P


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ruveyn
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25 Jan 2013, 10:50 am

GoonSquad wrote:
Marybird wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Maybe you could even clone a Neanderthal Man, or a Denosovian Woman!

That would be awsome!


I've read a few papers that suggest that is very possible.


Possible, maybe. Feasible NOT.

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25 Jan 2013, 11:00 am

GoonSquad wrote:
Marybird wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Maybe you could even clone a Neanderthal Man, or a Denosovian Woman!

That would be awsome!


I've read a few papers that suggest that is very possible.

I don't know how ethical or awesome it would be. We're talking about effectively producing a sapient lab rat. I don't think that is a good idea.

I'm sure there WILL be Mammoths cloned eventually... That's cool. I'd eat one. :P



That could very well be the only good reason to clone extinct animals.

Thing about it. If you could clone a brontosaurus and 'farm' them, the ratio of feed to meat and the time it takes for growth exponentially defeat cattle and most other meat sources.

Dinosaurs matured very,very rapidly so in the time it takes to grow a cow you could have the meat equivalent of 10 cows in a bronto.

The Moa is another great example. Bigger than an ostrich and through oral history of the Maori we know they grew very fast and one would feed a large amount of people...talk about a superchicken. Ostriches are not used as a food source because they grow too slow but a Moa was supposed to be at full growth inside a year or so.



BlackSabre7
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31 Jan 2013, 7:42 am

I wonder if it's possible that there could be preserved dinos anywhere in the world? Maybe someplace frozen for 65My, or some sort of tar pit that wasn't buried deep enough for geological diagenesis to ruin the DNA? Is mozzies in amber really the only option? I realize the earth has gone through warm periods and ice comes and goes, but 65my hasn't seen THAT much 'continental drift'. There were dinos in Antarctica, so maybe a tar pit there, which then got slightly buried, then frozen? And not necessarily dino's, but seeds/pollen/insects could be cool.
Um, so could microbes.
I think I smell another SciFi Movie!! :compress:



naturalplastic
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31 Jan 2013, 1:24 pm

BlackSabre7 wrote:
I wonder if it's possible that there could be preserved dinos anywhere in the world? Maybe someplace frozen for 65My, or some sort of tar pit that wasn't buried deep enough for geological diagenesis to ruin the DNA? Is mozzies in amber really the only option? I realize the earth has gone through warm periods and ice comes and goes, but 65my hasn't seen THAT much 'continental drift'. There were dinos in Antarctica, so maybe a tar pit there, which then got slightly buried, then frozen? And not necessarily dino's, but seeds/pollen/insects could be cool.
Um, so could microbes.
I think I smell another SciFi Movie!! :compress:


"The Lost World"- It was already written- and made - and remade by Hollywood!

Just because nature has given us a number of 20 thousand year old frozen mammoths and one five thousand year old Alpine man does not mean we can ask for a 65 million year old frozen dinosaur. The earth would have to both hide and preserve the dino for that long-AND- not turn the dino into fossil fuel at the same time. Thats asking alot. There was a lady scientist I read about in Discover Magazine who had high hopes of finding actual dinosaur tissue in dinosaur fossils- for DNA extraction. She said ( and other dinosaur big guns like Bakker and Horner confirmed this) that the brown colored dinosaur bones found in some particular strata in Wymoming were known among paleiontologist to "smell bad" implying that after 65 plus million years they still had rotting dinosaur tissue. But- I have not heard anything about this lady nor efforts since.

In labs theyve gotten chicken embryos to grow teeth.

Maybe the could some how mine the genome of living birds to somehow recreate the carnivorous dinosaur ancestors of birds.



Darkone101
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31 Jan 2013, 4:53 pm

I thought we were already wrong on a mammoth? Also in the 80s I believe a mammoth was dug up and ate by Scientists...



thomas81
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31 Jan 2013, 7:07 pm

whether or not its possible is one question, whether or not its desirable is another.

I do not really want to share a planet with giant man eating reptiles that can run as fast as a truck.


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Stargazer43
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31 Jan 2013, 7:28 pm

It's highly unlikely. DNA decays and degrades over time, so over millions of years the possibility of finding a complete dinosaur genome is pretty much nonexistent. Imagine if you left an egg sitting on a plate in your kitchen for 300 million years...it would be unrecognizable after so long a time. Now, if you look at say, mammoths, then there is a much greater possibility since they died off much more recently. I actually think scientists were able to extract some DNA from a well-preserved mammoth recently, I read the story saying they hoped to but don't know if they ever actually did or not.