The Theory of Nothing

Could science create a dinosaur?

Could science create a dinosaur?

This question is of interest because of the Jurassic Park movies in which dinosaurs were created from the DNA contained in a blood sample from an ancient mosquito frozen in amber.

Unfortunately, this method would not work because the sample would be too small and it would have been contaminated after 120 million years to effectively get a complete genome of a dinosaur. DNA decays over time and is only reliable for approximately ten thousand years, so using DNA from millions of years ago just won’t cut it.

However, there is another way to clone a dinosaur. Simply put, modern birds have the genetic information related to dinosaurs. Supposedly, taking the DNA extracted from an Apatosaurus fossil and implanting it into the womb of an ostrich has resulted in a dinosaur clone. They called it Spot. I’m not sure how reliable this report is, but the method of doing it has been proposed as a way to create a dinosaur.

The fact is that the ostrich has a lot of dinosaur DNA and a genetic manipulation could produce a dinosaur. All that’s needed is to understand how to turn on the ancient dinosaur DNA and suppress the ostrich DNA. This is easier said than done. One has to know what DNA information belongs to the ostrich and what belongs to dinosaurs. I don’t think we’re there yet.

Part of the problem is that dinosaurs disappeared sixty five million years ago when a big asteroid smacked into the Yucatan and annihilated all of the dinosaurs. Any fossils left over are too old to obtain reliable DNA. The common method of cloning is to insert the nucleus of a desired animal’s cell into the cell of host animal and then destroy the host’s nucleus. Unfortunately, there are no intact dinosaur cells to extract a nucleus from.

The only path left is to reinvent dinosaur DNA. How one would do this is a mystery. How could we know what DNA we would need to make a dinosaur? The only way is to sniff through the DNA of birds to find the ancient DNA fragments of their ancestors, the dinosaurs. That’s not going to be easy, but I don’t see any other way. This would make a fantastic PhD thesis for some brilliant new biologist.

The bottom line here is: don’t expect to see a Jurassic Park anytime soon. Besides, even if science could accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, would we want dinosaurs running amok? We can’t seem to preserve the animal species we have now. How about creating recently extinct animals such as the Passenger Pigeon, the Golden Toad, the Baiji River Dolphin, and the Javan Tiger. Let’s see science bring those back. Yeah!

Thanks for reading.