Life might find a way, but science usually requires a pretty detailed map.
Can a real-life "Jurassic Park" ever happen or are
we doomed to never know what it was like when monsters ruled the earth?
Every living thing dies, and then decomposes.
And, according to Mental Floss, your DNA starts breaking down almost immediately,
along with all the other parts of you that go on to feed the worms and fertilize the flowers.
Even under perfect conditions, scientists don't think DNA is especially resilient.
According to a 2021 study published in the journal Nature, the oldest DNA known
to science is over 1 million years old, from mammoths recovered from Siberian permafrost.
Now granted, that is very old by human standards, but consider this: DNA from the last dinosaur that
ever lived would be another 65 million years older still, and that's an awful lot of years.
There were actually cold-climate dinosaurs, so in theory, it's possible that a few might have
died in places where the conditions were just right for long-term preservation.
Still, even if those dinos rested in peace in below-freezing temperatures, and the climate
never changed, it would take just 6.8 million years for their DNA to turn to dust. Which means
that if scientists wanted to sequence some of that DNA, they're just under 60 million years too late.
Even if scientists did have a complete strand of dinosaur DNA,
they don't actually have the technology to use DNA alone to re-create an animal.
In order to create clones using modern technology, scientists need a living egg cell
so they have something to put the DNA into. The egg cell then has to be implanted into the uterus
of a host mother, which ideally is a member of the same species as the clone. Not only do they
not have any dinosaur egg cells, they also don't have any dinosaur mothers, and never mind that
egg-laying species don't actually have an internal incubation chamber to implant the egg into.
So what scientists really need is to be able to go back in time, get a living dinosaur egg cell
and some intact dino DNA, and then they'll have the raw materials needed to re-create a dinosaur.
On the other hand, if they had the technology to go back in time and obtain a living dinosaur
egg cell and some DNA, they really wouldn't need to re-create dinosaurs,
because they could just kidnap entire baby dinosaurs instead.
"It's the perfect crime."
Scientists have been pondering the idea of "de-extinction" for many years, mostly for animals
that became extinct because of some man-made injustice. Passenger pigeons, for example, became
extinct because people ate them and annexed most of their habitat. People who advocate bringing
back these and other recently extinct creatures say success would right a terrible wrong.
Now, let's say there was a similarly compelling reason for bringing back the dinosaurs.
Even so, scientists have to overcome a lot of hurdles to de-extinct even recently
deceased animals, and these are animals they have mostly complete genomes for.
There's always going to be some degradation of the DNA, for example, which means there will
be guesswork involved, and the re-created animal won't be exactly like the original.
Also, some genes won't activate unless in the presence of certain environmental triggers,
which may be impossible to replicate in the modern day.
Science has had the ability to clone animals for a few decades now. In 1996, Dolly the
sheep proved to the world that you don't always need both a sperm and an egg to make a baby.
Since then, scientists have cloned a lot of other animals, including mice, pigs,
horses, dogs, and cats. Notably absent from this list, however, are birds.
So far, science has not been able to figure out how to clone a bird,
and that has larger implications for future plans to clone the egg-laying dinosaurs.
However, some scientists don't think it's possible to clone birds at all. That's because currently
the cloning process is fundamentally incompatible with the way birds reproduce. To clone a mammal,
the nucleus of a living egg cell is removed and replaced with genetic material from the donor
animal. When the new embryo is big enough, it's implanted into the uterus of the host parent,
where it continues developing until it's ready to enter the world. In a bird's egg, the nucleus
that contains the genetic material is a tiny speck located somewhere within the egg yolk,
and because the yolk is too large to be observed under a microscope, it's so far
proven impossible to isolate that tiny spec so the nucleus could be replaced with donor DNA.
Also, because bird embryos incubate externally,
you can't just implant the modified egg into a host parent and let nature take its course.
The modern Earth is a very different place from the prehistoric Earth where dinosaurs thrived.
Even if it were possible to clone a dinosaur-like creature,
scientists know precious little about all the variables that would be necessary to
create the right environment to support our dino-like creations.
This is a major problem when taking an animal out of its habitat and
fast-forwarding it to the modern era. Birds, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs,
have had 66 million years to evolve with and adapt to the planet as it is today.
Resurrected dinosaurs aren't going to have that same evolutionary history, so it would
be a bit like dropping a human being onto a completely different planet without a spacesuit.
The idea that scientists could get DNA out of blood from a long-dead mosquito is intriguing,
and even seemed pretty plausible for those of us who saw "Jurassic Park."
Scientists were intrigued too, and in fact, some of them actually tried it.
In 2013, scientists tried to retrieve DNA from a stingless bee entombed in 10,000-year-old copal,,
the sub-fossilized precursor of amber. They were not only unable to find DNA in
the 10,000-year-old specimen, they were also unable to retrieve anything useful
from a similar specimen that was only around 60 years old. The younger sample did contain DNA,
but it was more similar to the DNA of a bumblebee than that of the entombed stingless
bee. The researchers noted that the DNA could have just been especially degraded, but either way,
even 60-year-old DNA wasn't very well preserved in copal, which means the DNA inside an entombed
mosquito would likely disappear long before the copal actually became a piece of amber.
Still, there are those rare occasions when scientists have found dinosaur bones that
look a lot, well, fresher than dinosaur bones are supposed to look. In 1997, a paper that appeared
in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology claimed to have discovered fragments of
collagen and hemoglobin molecules in the bone of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Not everyone was convinced,
though. According to Discover, other scientists pooh-poohed the discovery, saying the material
must have come from an outside contaminant. Undeterred, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer — the
author of the 1997 study — suggested that if cellular material could be preserved for millions
of years, there might be circumstances under which DNA could be preserved, too.
Then, in a 2020 paper published in National Science Review,
Schweitzer and her co-authors reported finding the chemical markers of DNA
in the calcified cartilage of a duck-billed dinosaur. And in 2021, researchers announced
that they'd identified potential DNA molecules from a 125-million-year-old Caudipteryx.
Still, many scientists remain unconvinced, noting that it would be really easy for foreign DNA to
infiltrate those samples. A dead animal, after all, decomposes in an environment filled with
other organisms, and even millions of years after its death an exceptionally well-preserved bone
is going to contain microbes, both living and dead. To an eager scientist, the DNA from those
microbes could be mistaken for the DNA of the dinosaur from which the bone originally came.
When most people think about the dangers of bringing back the dinosaurs,
they consider the fact that the majority of humans don't want to be hunted by very,
very large predators — but bringing back a creature that lived millions of years ago
also holds less obvious dangers. First of all, even if scientists could find an ecosystem that
was capable of supporting these newly resurrected creatures, they would qualify as invasive species,
which means they might disrupt and even destroy any present-day ecosystem they were placed in.
Given that planet Earth is already losing ecosystems at an unprecedented rate,
maybe purposely creating new invaders wouldn't be such a great idea.
But what if scientists brought back a peaceful,
herbivorous dinosaur that they could put within a type of zoo enclosure? Sounds safe enough.
But LiveScience notes another small problem — DNA contains a lot of junk. Furthermore,
some of that junk may be inherited viral DNA that, generations before, was just kind of
hanging around in a cell after infection and ended up being incorporated into the animal's genome.
What if resurrecting the dinosaur meant awakening a prehistoric virus, with the ability to infect
modern humans? That could be a lot worse than an escaped T. rex and a couple of Velociraptors.
"The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me."
What if you could take a modern creature and reverse engineer it to look like an ancient one?
The science behind this idea is pretty sound, at least for recently extinct animals. The
idea behind this is that certain genes that were expressed in an extinct species are probably still
present, but "switched off," in its close living relatives. Scientists have, in a way, resurrected
the extinct quagga with this approach by selectively breeding for the quagga's distinctive
coloring in plains zebras. These animals aren't exactly quaggas, since the original species almost
certainly possessed other traits scientists don't even know about, but they're close.
It's one thing to do this with closely related species, but quite another to do
it with a dinosaur. Still, some scientists are trying, including Jack Horner, famous
for the "Dino-Chicken" project that was much talked about circa 2014, for a while at least.
Since then, researchers in Chile were able to manipulate chicken genes to produce chickens
with dinosaur-like legs, while Harvard and Yale researchers were similarly able to put
a dinosaur-like snout on chicken embryos. So in theory, you could reverse engineer
a dinosaur-like chicken in this manner, but to what end? Creating a creature that nature never
intended does beg an awful lot of moral and ethical questions.
Retrieving viable ancient DNA is seemingly impossible,
and let's just admit that a world populated by "dino-chickens" is not very appealing. But what
if scientists could just artificially re-create DNA instead? What if scientists were somehow able
to figure out what a dinosaur's complete genome looked like — could they just make it in a lab?
Maybe, in theory at least, though not having a preserved strand of DNA to use
as a reference is still a pretty big hurdle to overcome. But let's say a researcher found a
perfect template of a dinosaur DNA strand. Well, using that information to physically
synthesize an entire DNA sequence would still be a monumental task. In 2017, scientists were
able to do this with a 770 kilobase DNA sequence — a strand containing 770,000 base pairs of DNA.
The creature in question: some yeast. So, not an especially complex animal, and larger animals
have many, many more base pairs — hundreds of millions of them, which means it's not possible to
synthesize the DNA sequence for an entire, large dinosaur with the technology that exists today.
But, technology is improving, so maybe there's hope.
Maybe one day scientists will know enough about genomes to be able to make
educated guesses about what a dinosaur's genome probably looked like. And maybe,
one day, scientists will also be able to invent a computer that doesn't crash. Anything's possible.
Let's say all the hurdles were overcome, and scientists figure out exactly how to
re-create a dinosaur. They have the genome, they have an artificial egg,
they've got a climate "bubble" that replicates the exact conditions that dinosaurs once lived in,
and all they need is some funding. Then what?
Would the synthesized animal that came out of that artificial egg actually be a dinosaur?
Maybe not. Such a creature would have no ties to the world it was dropped into, no genetic history,
and no friends or relatives. At best, it would become a dinosaur-like zoo exhibit, at worst,
a lonely thing living in a world that it doesn't belong to. According to Paleontology World,
putting an extinct animal back into an unfamiliar world would be cruel, not just because the plants
and temperatures are all wrong, but because the world has been emptied of the species it
evolved amongst and interacted with. "Because it's cool" isn't really a great reason to subject an
animal to that kind of existence. There's even a Jurassic Park quote about this very problem:
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,
they didn't stop to think if they should."
And anyway, you can look at it rationally — there are already dinosaurs living among us.
Why resurrect a Corythoraptor jacobsi when the cassowary already looks almost exactly like it,
and is also endangered? Maybe science should focus on saving the species that are here now,
instead of trying to bring back animals not meant to be here at all.
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