The dinosaurs!
Despite being wiped out by an asteroid 65 million years ago, these gigantic reptiles
still live on in popular culture.
But could we actually bring them back to life?
Jurassic Park popularized the idea that it could one day be possible.
In the movie, they are resurrected by taking the dinosaur DNA from ancient mosquitoes that
have been preserved in amber for millions of years.
Unfortunately, this is extremely unlikely.
Mosquitoes trapped in amber are not a particularly good source of DNA.
There’s no good source of DNA that’s more than 700,000 years old, and dinosaurs are
much further back than that.
Whilst we might not be able to use dino DNA to clone them, all hope is not lost.
Another possible way of bringing back the dinosaurs would be to reverse-engineer one,
starting with a living species and then working backwards.
If we were to take a crack at dinosaurs at all, it would be more based on looking at
the features in modern species like ostriches, how parts of the ostrich body have scales rather than
feathers, how you would get the hands and claws back where they currently have wings.
We’ve engineered elephant cells so that they have material from ancient mammoth DNA
and the goal of that is to see if we can recreate some of the traits of the mammoth in the laboratory
and that’s going quite well.
Embedded in that is our technologies we’ve developed that allow us to read the ancient
DNA, which did not exist 25 years ago but now my lab and others have developed, so-called
next generation sequencing, which allows us to sequence literally thousands of genomes
of ancient animals and also to synthesize the DNA on a large scale to recreate those
ancient animals.
So, can we really bring dinosaurs back to life?
I hesitate to say impossible, but certainly at present it’s quite challenging to bring
parts of species back, and for dinosaurs we have no DNA.
The best we could do with our current understanding would be to bring back the features of dinosaurs
based on their closest relatives which are the large birds.
It looks like we’re very far off from re-creating real dinosaurs.
For now, we’ll have to make do with seeing them on the silver screen.