Dinosaur Files

Is it possible to restore dinosaur DNA and create actual dinosaurs?

I have read that dinosaur DNA does exist but is highly degenerated over millions of years, making it impossible to recreate dinosaurs like in the movie "Jurassic Park" I know its highly impossible, but it there ANYYYY possible way, even if it is a stretch, for scientists to recreate some sort of ancient prehistoric animals?

Public Comments

1. Theoretically yes it is.
2. As what you heard, it is nigh impossible to create a dinosar from the amount of genetic code we have on them. To really do that, the ENTIRE genetic structure of a dinosaur would have to be reconstructed, and that would take countless years of trial and error to see what sort of genetics in today's animals fits the missing parts. Possibly even certain strands of the dinosaurs went into history with them. But, if all that was by some minute overcome, then there might be a chance of reproducing one. BUt even then, find the right kind of egg cell to place the dino 'nucleus' into will be hell by itself, and it will only yield one, sterile, short lived dinosaur.
3. yes, but you'd have to recover very well preserved dna from a dinosaur, and find its flosest ancestor, and wait many generations for it to be much similiar.
4. theoretically yes but you would need some DNA for than and i dont think that there is any DNA left from them because they have been deteriorating for millions of years
5. No
6. I'm sorry if you want the dinos to come back, but the truth is that the only way to clone a pre-historic animal is to have viable genetic DNA which, unfortunetly cannot have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without anything short than an act of God.
7. I know a prof who was involved in some super-secret project to try to do just that - get dinosaur DNA. To the best of my knowledge (and mind you, this was several years back), they were never successful. (either that or they were too successful, and that's why we've not heard about it...) But let's say you managed to get bits and peices of dino DNA, and put it together into functioning chromosomes, until you had what you were pretty certain was the entire genome of that dino. Then you'd have to find a way to get a host cell to think those chromosomes were its own (a step beyond cloning as we do it now). But wait ... mitochondrial DNA. So you'd have to get dino mtDNA, and do the same with mitochondria, something we don't yet know how to do. .. ... yeeeaah. So not going to happen.