NEWS: Next Stop, Jurassic Park

Koleeta said:

seriously! have we learned NOTHING from the movies?! DINOSAURS ARE ASSHOLES!

louys said:

Can I just say... this guy belongs in the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™.

maurauder said:

[Edited on Mar 25, 2005 by maurauder]

maurauder said:

[Edited on Mar 25, 2005 by maurauder]

DarthSmurf said:
Chance of finding enough dinosaur DNA to EVER clone one?

0%

DNA just degrades too fast. The stuff is WAY too fragile... even exposure to water will destroy it. The only reason the water in living tissue doesn't fuck up DNA is due to the self-repair mechanisms in living cells. The whole "dino blood from an insect in amber" bit is also bogus... even if the bug was encased in the amber immediately after filling up on dino blood, the bug's digestive tract enzymes & bacteria will still keep going for a while even after the bug has snuffed it. Bye bye DNA.

ANother myth I saw referenced in one of the above links is the "replacement" of the bone structure in fossilized bones by minerals. That's a VERY old myth that's been accepted as "fact" for far too long. A fossilized bone still has a good portion of the original bone present. The bone has had all its miscroscopic cracks, crevices & pores filled with silica or other minerals leaching out of the groundwater. That's why researchers are able to perform histological studies on dinosaur bone structure... it's still the original material, at least on that scale. It's only when you get down to the molecular level that things get screwed up by millions of years of decay & so on.

(In some cases, after a bone has been encased in rock, acidic groundwater can get in and dissolve the bone away completely. The resulting empty space in the surrounding rick can then be filled by other minerals. This is not true fossilization, but rather replacement. What you find in this case would not be a fossilized bone, but crystallized minerals in the gross physical shape of the original bone.)

OK, Dino Geek Mode DEACTIVATE!

JohnFM1 said:

If the DNA dries out quickly enough, fragments would probably stay fairly intact.
Of course that depends on them being protected from bacteria or anything else that might want to eat them.
The chances of large pieces of DNA remaining are practically 0% though.

Since cloning technology at the moment is based on nuclear transfer, we'd need entire cells to stay intact, not just bits of DNA, and that just ain't gonna happen until we find a frozen dinosaur somewhere.

However, fragments of DNA would still be interesting.

JohnFM1 Maybe, just maybe it'll happen. But then what would we do with them? Their natural habitat is pretty much all gone now. And even if it wasnt, who'd wanna travel to the Russian steppes to see some big hairy elephants?

JohnFM1 said:
People are trying with the mammoths...I think they planned to use elephant eggs for the cloning, which presents enough problems on its own.
Dolly the sheep took about 230 tries - I cant imagine anyone really wanting to go through that many female elephants - or waiting a couple of years only for them to turn out to be full of birth defects!

The main problem though is that none of the mammoths found so far have been particularly well preserved....

Maybe, just maybe it'll happen. But then what would we do with them? Their natural habitat is pretty much all gone now. And even if it wasnt, who'd wanna travel to the Russian steppes to see some big hairy elephants?

DarthSmurf said:

Not to mention the fact that elephants are social animals... I wonder if the elephant mothers would care for the mammoth hybrid clones, or if the animal would be different enough that the mother would reject it? If the latter occurs, it's possible that other elephants would also shun the hybrid, leading to a load of rather unpleasant issues.