Cloning Dinosaurs? Purley Science Fiction

moondoggy23

moondoggy23

Well-Known Member
My dreams today have been absolutely smashed. Like the delicate amber that they were once encased, they are proven false and impossible. Nature posted an article stating that DNA has a typical half-life of 521 years. This means that under the most ideal situations, DNA can be preserved for a maximum of 6.8million years. So, what does this have to do with my dreams? The simple fact that it would not be at all possible to clone dinosaurs. Considering they went extinct some 65million years ago, any evidence of DNA in samples paleontologists may recover are too degraded for use in cloning.

At least we may still get a wooly mammoth...

jurassic-park-clone.jpg

You're dead to me! Literally!
 
GreenEarth

GreenEarth

Well-Known Member
The article keeps saying ideal conditions but they never talk about what those conditions are. Water, oxygen and temperature all contribute to decay. Also sequencing technology is also an issue. Currently you need a lot of DNA to get a signal when sequencing. For example you can't just take one strand of DNA and sequence it, but that method is being developed (currently with poor accuracy , 1 in 10 base reads are wrong). The article doesn't answer whether completely spontaneous decay occurs or decay because of outside elements, because if a perfect place on earth exists some DNA might be preserved if spontaneous decay doesn't occur. The answer is in this article, and the intro paragraph says spontaneous happens, but again is that from outside elements or just because it happens no matter what. I'll read the rest of it later, dun have time now.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v362/n6422/pdf/362709a0.pdf
 
Pasaria

Pasaria

Well-Known Member
GreenEarth said:
The article keeps saying ideal conditions but they never talk about what those conditions are.
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Nature.com said:
Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate....The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years.
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Patchouli

Patchouli

Well-Known Member
Nature.com said:
Groundwater is almost ubiquitous, so DNA in buried bone samples should, in theory, degrade at a set rate....The team predicts that even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years.
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Bones? Why would we be getting the DNA from bones? Aside from the fact that I don't believe the Earth is quite that old, I would think the Jurassic Park amber thing would be much more of a preservation than BONE we just find as part of a skeleton. Of course we're not going to find anything in that.

Also, incase the article says more, I didn't actually read it, too tired to, just read what Pasaria quoted >.>
 
GreenEarth

GreenEarth

Well-Known Member
hnnnnnnng.jpg

ah oops, I guess I shouldn't read articles when I'm studying. Then again it doesn't always have to be bone, and -5 C is a bit too high, there are colder places on earth? dunnno broooo
 
Patchouli

Patchouli

Well-Known Member
GreenEarth said:
View attachment 131251
ah oops, I guess I shouldn't read articles when I'm studying. Then again it doesn't always have to be bone, and -5 C is a bit too high, there are colder places on earth? dunnno broooo
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I'd assume there'd probably be dinosaurs in weird places like Antarctica, I mean they found palm trees frozen in the ice, I'd think other stuff could be in there. But no one wants to randomly dig around in Antarctica.
 
jvp

jvp

Active Member
Yea, if you believe in, "science" and "facts" and "quantitative analysis."

But if you choose to believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and humans used to live side by side with dinosaurs, Flintstone style (also the name of a sex move--don't ask), then we could yet one day be rolling in dinosaur poop.
 
Patchouli

Patchouli

Well-Known Member
moondoggy23 said:
You can get genetic material from bone marrow, which is inside bone. It's this new crazy discovery that's taking over the science world.
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Yes, but my point is bones aren't exactly the best at preserving the marrow inside. I didn't figure we would be trying to do that just incase one might happen to possibly be preserved, maybe.
 
oozinator

oozinator

Well-Known Member
We can still attempt to genetically engineer dinosaur-like creatures, although I'd figure that it'd be very hard to find the capital for such an expensive, risky, and questionably ethical venture.
 
yukyduky

yukyduky

Active Member
Patchouli said:
Yeah, but that's because they found one completely frozen. We haven't found dinosaurs like that.
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No, it's because mammoth's came much later than dinosaurs so their DNA would only be a maximum of 5 million years old compared to 65.5 million years.
 
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