Question: Do you think what happened in Jurassic Park could work (extracting dinosaur blood from ancient mosquito stuck in amber)?

  1. Hi pnemono,

    It is possible to find dino-DNA, but it is extremely rare. Worse still, is a full sequence of dino-DNA has never been found, it has only ever been found in fragments.

    DNA is a fragile molecule. Extracting it in the lab from good current living animals is one thing, and not difficult, but extracting it from 65 million year old bugs, much more of a problem.

    However it would be very cool. A number of researchers though are working on reverse engineering current animals to get an idea of what dinosaurs may have been like. They are working with birds such as chickens and emus. They have managed to lengthen the tail of chickens, and even have them grow teeth.

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  2. Probably not but that hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying to clone a mammoth. I would think it is highly unlikely that we could get this to happen. Which is a shame in some ways and really great in others.

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  3. Hi Pnemo,
    Probably not, because it would probably be difficult to find a full DNA sequence of an extinct animal. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, and now that they have actually found an intact, preserved mammoth, I’m sure some scientists are trying/will try to clone it! Realistically, we are probably much better off trying to preserve the animals that are currently alive and making sure none of the currently endangered animals actually becomes extinct, rather than trying to resurrect creatures that died out a very long time ago and which would probably find it very difficult to live in our world if they did come back (because of factors such as the different climate, and the different plants/animals that would be available as food sources now than what they were used to in the past).

    There are scientists who are actually cloning currently endangered species (using closely related, non-endangered species as surrogate mothers) in order to try and build up their numbers in the world. I think that this is a fantastic use for cloning technology.

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Comments

  1. that is so cool, especially the chicken part.

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