Eh. Doesn't mean we can't cook some up from scratch.

Well, here's hoping for time travel to get developed so we can go back and nab us a couple of our reptilian friends.

This actually isn't ENTIRELY true. I was watching a program on the Discovery Channel that basically said all DNA retains the information of the previous animals - evolution essentially "turns off" and "on" different embryonic hormones, enabling and disabling the production of different species. I don't really get the technical jargon, so I can't explain it too well, but suffice it to say that, according to them, it should be possible to produce a chicken (by applying the right hormones during embryonic development) that looks and acts like it's prehistoric ancestor - including dinosaurs.

They also stressed that the resulting creation would not BE a dinosaur - it wouldn't be a carbon copy of an ancient species - but it would have all the characteristics of one. DNA, apparently, doesn't normally LOSE any of its details, it either adds them or adaptation causes "macro-evolution" turning on/off different aspects of DNA, altering the species but not changing the DNA itself.

Whatever, I barely understand what I'm saying myself, but my point is that there actually is hope!

People, these scientists held back by facts, ethics, and the laws of physics have crushed our dream for jetpacks, dinosaurs, and laser rifles for TO LONG! Gentlemen, we need to overthrow the old scientifical order, and put in place NEW scientists that will not stop at NOTHING to bring the dinosaurs back to life.

Hehe, they used Moa bones!

I remember going to a camping lodge during primary school that had a mini museum full of the things.

Bhaalspawn:

Public: Let's clone dinosaurs!
Scientist: Out you out of your batshit bonkers mind?!?!?!?! Did you not see Jurassic Park?

my thoughts exactly I don't know what is up with everyone else but I don't want to risk a T-Rex eating me or smashing my house to bits so I am glad its not possable

I still believe in the Dinosaur Neil method.

Neronium:
Ironically we were talking about this in Biology today along with Stem Cells since they can form any type of cell, well only some can. Basically you'd need the DNA of dinosaurs to be able to clone them and according to my professor DNA only lasts 600 years after you died. While it is sad we can't get ourselves some dinos on the bright side we can still revive Lincoln, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt and have them battle against terrorism. XD

captcha: Cool Squirrel. What's with all the squirrel captchas I'm getting? Last one I got was Lincoln Squirrel.

No we can't, clones out of DNA is only GENETICALLY identical; it does not preserve memory, habits or even guarantee superficial similarity. A clone of Lincoln may only guarantee his racial features, he may look entirely different from the real Lincoln being fatter, taller, sound differently with different habits and perspective from the source material, IT WILL NOT HAVE ANY OF REAL LINCOLN'S MEMORY!!

Cloning humans is practically useless with the exception of harvesting organs which are morally unacceptable in our society therefore makes it close to totally useless.

Stop ruining Jurassic Park!!! I guess it's time travel or bust, ha ha.

Oh, well that ruins my fantasy island business plan idea. Thanks a lot science, first you turn Dinosaurs from awesome large scale reptiles to giant chickens, and now you say we can't even try to do the cloning thing to find out :(

ok, nwo that this is clear, can we get on with the spaceships?

I don't care for dinosaurs, I just want a dodo bird as a pet.

So as of now they can't. Who's to say in 100, 500, 1000 years from now science hasn't advanced so far they can easily do it?

When no blueprint is avalible to build stuff from, call a creative person.

While i highly doubt the technology is ginna be present in the near future, maybe one day we the human race, or more precicely, our scientists, would be able to not just clone stuff from existing DNA, but create our own blueprints, using DNA we made from scratch, or at least modifieed existing DNA enough to cut and paste parts of DNA code together, and creatve our own kind of dinos (1 meter tall T-rex without sharp teeth who eats modern day grass, instead of having a lawn mover, oh yeah)

This post is not based on any factual knowledge about genetic engineering, but the resistant hopes and dreams of a nerd.

Maybe android technology (the aratificial perosn thingy, not mobile phones) will allow us to make bio-mechs some day, and then it's just a matter of giving it shape.

What happened to you science?

You used to be cool...

When it comes to science, never say never. You can say it's impossible now, but you shouldn't say that it's 100% impossible and that it will never happen.

Okay, well, maybe aliens exist? And they kidnapped a handful of dinosaur specimens? And have successfully continued on the dinosaurs as a species? And so when aliens come to Earth and are all "hey guys, we're aliens, 'sup," what we need to do - as a collective species, represented by The President of the USA, probably - is take said alien by the space collars and scream in his space face: "TAKE US TO THE DINOSAURS"

and then they will, probably. here i drew a picture of it

albino boo:

mad825:
Impossible? No. Too early to say.

Our very understand of DNA is still in it's infancy. While I'll agree that we cannot "clone" the current samples, we could replicate it by filling in the missing pieces with what we know if computer technology evolves.

Decoding D.N.A is still a fairly complex and costly process with margin errors.

The article is not talking about decoding DNA but the much simpler sequencing of DNA. In 521 years half of the polypeptide bonds that form the double helix of DNA would have broken. Seeing that each strand of DNA will not have all broken in the same place, its possible to work out what the original sequence was. After 6.5 million years the fragments of DNA are to small to reconstruct the original order that adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine bases came in. After 65 million years all that would be left would the individual bases, it would like trying to reconstruct a sand castle after driving a bulldozer over it. All the bits are there but they have lost all organisation so you cant fill the missing pieces from another source.

I was talking about how our understanding is still underdevelopment. If we want to find a certain sequence of code in the D.N.A strand we would have to decode the whole thing and then analyse it. It's as if were reading binary and we need to develop Hexadecimal, octdemical and programming languages such as C#/C++. In terms of technological advances, Unix still hasn't been development.

DNA itself is nothing more than a computer program designed to do a task so hopefully in the next hundred years, heavy computing tasks and our DNA understanding today would be a trivial task then allowing friendlily computer software to program and predict the outcome of structures of DNA just like MS Studios can program and predict the outcome of code.

AKA; The digitalisation of DNA.

mad825:

albino boo:

mad825:
Impossible? No. Too early to say.

Our very understand of DNA is still in it's infancy. While I'll agree that we cannot "clone" the current samples, we could replicate it by filling in the missing pieces with what we know if computer technology evolves.

Decoding D.N.A is still a fairly complex and costly process with margin errors.

The article is not talking about decoding DNA but the much simpler sequencing of DNA. In 521 years half of the polypeptide bonds that form the double helix of DNA would have broken. Seeing that each strand of DNA will not have all broken in the same place, its possible to work out what the original sequence was. After 6.5 million years the fragments of DNA are to small to reconstruct the original order that adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine bases came in. After 65 million years all that would be left would the individual bases, it would like trying to reconstruct a sand castle after driving a bulldozer over it. All the bits are there but they have lost all organisation so you cant fill the missing pieces from another source.

I was talking about how our understanding is still underdevelopment. If we want to find a certain sequence of code in the D.N.A strand we would have to decode the whole thing and then analyse it. It's as if were reading binary and we need to develop Hexadecimal, octdemical and programming languages such as C#/C++. In terms of technological advances, Unix still hasn't been development.

DNA itself is nothing more than a computer program designed to do a task so hopefully in the next hundred years, heavy computing tasks and our DNA understanding today would be a trivial task then allowing computer friendlily software to program and predict the outcome of structures of DNA just like MS Studios can program and predict the outcome of code.

What the article says is that after 6.5 million years is is no longer mathematically possible to know what base pair exited and what order they came in. Its does not matter how sophisticated you get you model because there is no longer enough structure left to work a model from. There is only so far extrapolate, its fine when the fragments are lager you can do pattern matching and frequency analysis to model the original structure with high degrees of certainty. When the fragments get to be so small that instead of there being only 1 structure but multiple structures have equal mathematical validity. After a certain point there is no way of telling which base formed a pair and which base pair was next to each other because there is not enough information left to determine that. Its the same as if you take an ice sculpture, left it melt and then try and determine what shape the sculpture was from the water. The melt water contains the vast majority of the water molecules the formed the sculpture but none of the information as to how it was organised. Its the same process with DNA but because at STP DNAs covalent bonds are 1000s of times stronger than Hydrogen bonds in water ice this process takes millions of years.

I want to know why nobody has tried cross breading Komodo Dragons with crocodiles!
Or why not selectively bread crocodiles until you get a super giant monster one.

I might start a kickstarter to get the funding to do it myself.

I once talked about bringing back non avian dinosaurs with one of my biochemistry proffesors. Though you're right that we probebly won't find any intact DNA there is still the possibility, well, plausibility that we'll be able to reverse engineer this DNA from their closest living relatives, namely avian dinosaurs AKA birds.

Li Mu:
I want to know why nobody has tried cross breading Komodo Dragons with crocodiles!
Or why not selectively bread crocodiles until you get a super giant monster one.

I might start a kickstarter to get the funding to do it myself.

You'd have much better chances starting with a chicken or an Ostrich. Also good luck!

Well, this means we won't be able to replicate Dinosaurs, in the way Jurassic Park did.

HOWEVER, thanks to modern day genetics, we are able to backtrack an organism's DNA to more or less previous states in evolutionary development. Do that to a bird and what would you end up with in the end? Dinosaurs!

As a great synthetic mind once said, technology is not a straight line. There are many paths to the same end.

Hang on all this says is that we can't CLONE dinosaurs from primordial DNA.

It says nothing about genetically engineering a dinosaur.

Scientifically speaking we have all the things we need to make a dinosaur. We know the building blocks for genetic code. Can implant that code into cells and know how to cultivate these cells to at least a small lump or functional organism.

If we could somehow find a template of dinosaur DNA, something like maybe a current species of animal that hasn't evolved for a long long while like maybe a crocodile we could replicate the entire thing.

Sure they won't be exactly like the T-rex but I think we can classify any 18 feet tall giant reptile as a dinosaur.

Science never rules anything out, only changes the probability of things on a scale from probably to improbable.

Time travel is already theoretically possible and occurs all the time(when two black-holes collide there is a space where time goes backwards before the eventual collapse. At least if Neil deGrasse Tyson is to be believed http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmWO4Vtk-s8) So potentially it would be possible for us to travel back in time to get their DNA and clone them. YEAH, BET YOU DIDN'T THINK OF THAT MATT KAPLAN, DID YOU?

Well they found a T-Rex in Montana that had soft tissue and red blood cells in one of its leg bones. Within the samples they found along with DNA from fungi, insects and bacteria, "unidentifiable DNA sequences".

So you can all keep hope alive if you like.

Sure they won't be exactly like the T-rex but I think we can classify any 18 feet tall giant reptile as a dinosaur.

Why would it be?

People ignore the other major pillar of the book that was only given a few nods here and there in the movie because it got in the way of the "Wonder": The things in the Park weren't dinosaurs, they were GELFs made to look like them.

All the talk of the park all being an illusion boiled down to the animals themselves being one too. They were Frankenstein gestalts made up of bits and pieces of salvageable dinosaur DNA with the rest being stripped from modern animals loosely based on them being the closest living relatives to things that died 65 millions years ago.

In the book, near the end, Doctor Wu puts this to Hammond and doesn't even look on their creations as animals. They're nothing but machines made up of biological material that look and act like a close enough approximation to be the real thing.

Nothing about them is authentic besides those few stands of DNA. Even the dinosaurs whose DNA they're partially made up of are from vastly different eras of the Mesozoic all shoved together, their ecosystem is dead, most of the herbivores have dietary problems as a result of it and many of them labour to breath in our less oxygenated atmosphere.

When it comes down to it, they're only a slight step closer to actually being dinosaurs than synthetic machines dressed in dinosaur skin and fake programming.

The movie itself is ironic because they do this very thing. They make dinosaurs from robotics and CGI, then start flipping through the book of modern animal noises and behavior to fill in gaps fossils failed to preserve.

It's all bullshit, it's all fake, but it's still life, life made from human irresponsibly that then goes on to force equilibrium onto it's environment when it refuses to act the way we expect it to.

mad825:

albino boo:

mad825:
Impossible? No. Too early to say.

Our very understand of DNA is still in it's infancy. While I'll agree that we cannot "clone" the current samples, we could replicate it by filling in the missing pieces with what we know if computer technology evolves.

Decoding D.N.A is still a fairly complex and costly process with margin errors.

The article is not talking about decoding DNA but the much simpler sequencing of DNA. In 521 years half of the polypeptide bonds that form the double helix of DNA would have broken. Seeing that each strand of DNA will not have all broken in the same place, its possible to work out what the original sequence was. After 6.5 million years the fragments of DNA are to small to reconstruct the original order that adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine bases came in. After 65 million years all that would be left would the individual bases, it would like trying to reconstruct a sand castle after driving a bulldozer over it. All the bits are there but they have lost all organisation so you cant fill the missing pieces from another source.

I was talking about how our understanding is still underdevelopment. If we want to find a certain sequence of code in the D.N.A strand we would have to decode the whole thing and then analyse it. It's as if were reading binary and we need to develop Hexadecimal, octdemical and programming languages such as C#/C++. In terms of technological advances, Unix still hasn't been development.

DNA itself is nothing more than a computer program designed to do a task so hopefully in the next hundred years, heavy computing tasks and our DNA understanding today would be a trivial task then allowing friendlily computer software to program and predict the outcome of structures of DNA just like MS Studios can program and predict the outcome of code.

AKA; The digitalisation of DNA.

And the greatest threat to Mankind to ever exist.

I just realized that this result also calls panspermia theories into serious question. The time for rocks carrying DNA from one location to another could be MUCH longer than mere millions of years. I wonder if the half-life is appreciably lengthened by low temperature.

albino boo:

The article is not talking about decoding DNA but the much simpler sequencing of DNA. In 521 years half of the polypeptide bonds that form the double helix of DNA would have broken.

Phosphodiester.

*(sorry!)*

Mike Kayatta:
Science Officially Stomps All Hope of Dinosaur Cloning

Life has found a way ... to destroy the dreams of every man, woman, and child.

A wise man once described the universe thusly: "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs." But unfortunately for prominent chaotician Dr. Ian Malcom, Science, harsh mistress that she is, has recently proven at least part of the sentiment false. As it happens, mankind will likely never bring dinosaurs into the modern age, courtesy of amber-coated mosquitoes or otherwise. Unlike handcrafted dinosaur animatronics, it turns out that DNA just can't stand the test of time.

It was a neat idea and, this particular disappointing DNA factoid aside, a somewhat practical one: An insect drinks the blood of a dinosaur, becomes preserved in petrified tree sap, and lo and behold, millions of years later, we use the same procedure we used on that boring old sheep Dolly to make everyone and their uncle a pet Iguanacolossus. For years, the problem has been finding any DNA that's still intact, and while the scientific community has always had a fairly strong idea that dino-blueprints couldn't weather the ages, some jerk with a PhD in Australia had to go and pinch the proverbial flame of hope into a smoldering ember of despair once and for all.

The study was led by Morten Allentofy and Michael Bunce (who I'm sure are perfectly nice, and probably didn't mean to suck the wind from our dino sails like some sort of joy-sucking vacuum monster) and involved a detailed examination of 158 moa leg bones. Each of the bones were chock-full of DNA, and found within 5 kilometers of each other, preserved in near-identical condition. For years, determining the lifespan of DNA has been difficult, due to multiple variables of decay, including temperate, oxygenation, and microbial attack. With such a consistent sample, however, Allentofy and Bunce were able to finally peg DNA half-life at just 521 years. That means that every 521 years, 50% of the bonds holding the DNA together will have broken, and in 521 more years, half of what's remaining will do the same.

As you half and half, the decay exponentially slows, but not enough to survive the trip from Cretaceous Period to the Age of Honey Boo Boo. Extrapolated out, the longest DNA can survive is a paltry 6.8 million years, a far cry from last time a T-Rex had a pleasant afternoon, probably some 65 million years ago.

"This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect," said Simon Ho, awesome dinosaur scientist at the University of Sydney Australia. And while these findings basically rule out ever cloning domesticated dinosaurs as the obvious transportation solution to solve the oil crisis, according to Ho, at least "we might be able to break the record for the oldest authentic DNA sequence, which currently stands at about half a million years."

So yeah, there's hope of one day breaking the record for oldest deposit of decaying acid! That's totally awesome, and completely makes up for us never seeing dinosaurs! Right? Right? Come on people, I'm grasping at anything here.

Source: Nature.com

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Fun Fact: the same process that makes DNA Decay is also makes Radiocarbon dating not so foolproof

Do not despair, fair peoples! Dinosaurs have always been with us in a roundabout way. Simply look out the window, and there's a good chance you'll see one:

It's probably for the best actually, as the world is a very different place than it was during the Mezizoic. Personally, I think they should focus on bringing back species humans have hunted to extinction first (Dodo, Passenger Pigeon, Great Auk, Tasmanian Tiger, etc).