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Can dinosaurs really be brought back to life?
The new movie Jurassic World features a genetically modified dinosaur, called Indominus rex ("Untamable king"). It's a kind of theropod (flesh-eating dinosaur) called an abelisaur, and, according to the movie's website, is made up of genetic material obtained from Carnotaurus, Majungasaurus, Rogops and Giganotosaurus. As in an earlier movie, Jurassic Park, scientists cloned the dinosaurs by extracting dinosaur blood (and DNA) from mosquitoes fossilized in amber. But is bringing dinosaurs back to life really fiction, or can it be achieved for real?
In September 2014, researchers from Manchester University attempted to extract DNA from insects preserved in an amber-like substance. They were completely unable to reclaim any DNA, prehistoric or otherwise. This is because DNA molecules can only survive a few hundred thousand years—not the tens of millions years required to be anything to do with dinosaurs.
In any case, it would be highly unlikely that scientists could find usable dinosaur DNA in mosquito fossils.They would need to find a female mosquito that had consumed dinosaur blood immediately before landing in tree resin—which would be an extremely rare fossil indeed. But even if researchers did find one, extracting its DNA would still be enormously difficult. The blood with the dinosaur DNA would be surrounded by the body of an insect, which has its own DNA.
The most common form of cloning used on animals today involves scientists inserting the nucleus of one cell into a second cell of the same species. But there are no dinosaur cells that could host a nucleus. Researchers would have to find another way to let the DNA grow into a living dinosaur.
So how else might scientists clone dinosaurs? They could look for DNA specimens in fossilized bones instead of the bodies of insects. The problem here is that the process of fossilization involves replacing the tissue in an animal's bones with minerals. This destroys the cells that may contain DNA. However, one team of palaeontologists did, in 2005, actually discover what appears to be soft tissue in the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex—although they have not yet been able to isolate any DNA from these samples.
Another idea is that researchers could work out the sequence in the DNA of dinosaurs and recreate it. The sequencing of the human genome (the complete "instruction book" containing all its genes) took 13 years to complete, but this achievement still wasn't enough for researchers then to be able clone people. Reconstructing complete dinosaur DNA would require technology far beyond what exists today.
A third possibility is to reawaken dinosaur traits in the prehistoric reptiles' closest living relatives: birds. In fact, scientists nowadays consider birds to be dinosaurs themselves. Research is now under way to find a way to make some birds appear more dinosaur-like. Believe it or not, it's called the "chickenosaurus" project, and it's headed up by palaeontologist Dr Jack Horner, technical advisor for all of the Jurassic Park films.
By the process of genetic modulation, it is possible, for example, to re-grow the long tail characteristic of non-avian (non-bird) dinosaurs. But to create teeth (no bird has teeth), scientists would need to take DNA from another species, such as a mammal, that does have the genes to grow teeth.