Cloning Dinosaurs?

Question

Is it Scientificly possible to clone a dinosaur and for it to live?
Why or why not?

Answer 1

Ah, a fun question. There are three parts to this question and it has been answered reasonably well in both the Economist Magazine and New Scientist. So lets look at this.

1. Do we know the DNA for a dinosaur?

a) Well some pieces do remain amazingly in bits of bone and amber etc but they are a mess.

b) Since we are descended from them lots of DNA is available in us.

2. We could engineer the sequences by deciding what biological pathways need to be present to make a dinosaur and then 'Building' one. It would probably be close but not perfect copy (but it could even be a better version using all the new chemical trickery that has evolved since they died out - at the very least we would need to give them a 21st century immune system otherwise they would catch MRSA or the common cold and die almost immediately.

c) Once we have the DNA embryo designed then we need something to give berth to it. Probably a cow or a killer whale to be big enough and understood in captivity. Or maybe we could engineer an egg. Then we would have a 21st century dinosaur.

So it looks like we could build something like a Dinosaur in the foreseeable future but there is a lot of technology that needs to be invented first. DNA engineering being the main one.

Answer 2

Michael Crichton does VERY well with his science. The trick is knowing where the science ends and where the fiction begins.

We do have very small fragments of DNA that have been found from various sources, including blood samples in stomach of mosquitoes trapped in amber. None of these are from dinosaurs. People have tried and are trying though.

Another problem is that the scraps are just too small to actually assemble a creature from... it would be like trying to recreate "War and Peace" with just a couple pages. Even when there is DNA in amber, it is horribly, horribly degraded. We will be lucky to find much of any at all.

And the biggest obstacle of all is what are you going to do with all the DNA once you get it. We have learned from recent experiences with cloning that the egg cell contents are very important in producing a healthy creature from a single cell - and there seems to be NO prospect of obtaining anything close enough to a dinosaur egg that might be of use. Even the 'living fossils' that we have around that haven't changed much in the last 65 million years have still changed a bit, and few of them would have been good candidates for even pretty close relatives.

Finally, the environment is quite different now than it was 65 million years (or more) ago. You might have trouble keeping a cloned dinosaur alive with all the differences in temperature, food, disease, and so on.

All in all, it's not THEORETICALLY impossible - it is concievable that we find a perfect sample of ancient amber that's related to something we can use and whose environment we can replicate. In theory. But PRACTICALLY speaking... I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Answer 3

No. Assuming we could get blood from a mosquito like the one in Jurassic Park, most of the blood cells would be red blood cells. RBCs have no nucleus, and therefore no DNA. Yes, there would be white blood cells in there, but the number of them would be so low that the DNA they provide would be completely insignificant. Even if there was some way to get DNA, there would be no vector in which to clone it. Dolly, the cloned sheep, was born from the sheep she was cloned from. So, without other dinosaurs to lay the dinosaur egg, we couldn't clone them. Other reptiles wouldn't work because they wouldn't produce the necessary hormones to promote development.

Answer 4

in the event that they're admitting they're on the threshold of being able to do it (which they're) there's a solid risk somebody already has. there is cutting-edge debate approximately putting DNA from dinosaur remains in with cutting-edge chook and reptile eggs, case in point. You reckon no person's cloned a individual yet? direction they fu'cking have. you think of a splash ingredient like international ethics boards is going to provide up them? If I had the possibility, i might probable do it just to work out what befell. might that is desireable? I doubt it. yet then, while the yanks decide a thank you to farm a brontasaurus and make quite huge Macs....

Answer 5

No. The nuclear DNA that we could recover from Mesozoic era amber-fossil fly mouthparts is too degraded to be used as the basis for a clone's genome.
Also, we don't as yet have the technology to "write" long strings of DNA, make chromosomes out of them, and put chromosomes into nuclei.

Answer 6

No, it's hard to do with complete set of DNA and to do that with partial genome is just impossible. What they did in the movie is like those scientists knew enough to make dinosaurs from scratch.

Answer 7

No.

Any way's dinosaurs are just mdern day reptile that lived for Hundreds of years, before the flood happend.

Answer 8

There's a possibility...whether it works out or not has yet to be seen. One never knows until they try, but if we have DNA the potential grows.

Answer 9

Like Jeff Goldblum said in Jurrasic Park, "All this time thinking about whether or not you could, you never stopped to think about whether or not you should."

Answer 10

I read an article recently that said they were hoping to be able to do just that, but don't expect it any time soon. I tried to find it again, but no luck. Sorry.