So I know some stuff about Deextinction that makes me feel like it’s unlikely but from doing some research I wasn’t really sure what the answer is.
I know with the wooly mammoth that they are working on they couldn’t actually find complete dna even with some solid samples in decent environmental conditions (frozen in the arctic) and they went extinct MUCH more recently than dinosaurs. They only got bits and pieces of it because it degrades too fast so now they are basically just designing a new animal that’s a hairy elephant with tusks.
This makes me think that dna just degrades too fast for us to find complete dna from that long ago. Based on what I was reading it seems like the whole getting dna from mosquitos in amber and stuff isn’t really possible.
Is it possible there is still Dino dna out there in the world that we just either havnt found or havnt figured out how to be able to access yet? Obviously there is always a possibility but I mean some type of science that could lead to that conclusion? Based on the wooly mammoth it seems like if we got some decent parts of dna we could bring back some alternate version of dinosaurs
In: Biology
DNA naturally degrades, the bonds between the chemicals that make up the information in DNA will naturally break down over time. In normal conditions half of the bonds in DNA will break down in 521 years or so. This is known as the half-life, or the time for half of the DNA to decompose. So after about 1000 years about 75% of all the DNA in a sample would be gone.
In favorable conditions such as in Arctic Sea Ice, it has been estimated that the half life of DNA is about 1.1 million years. That’s much better than the 500ish years from before but the best we can tell the last dinosaurs died off about 66 million years ago. 66 million is quite a bit more than 1.1 million.
If we had 100% intact DNA in perfect conditions in the ice perfectly undisturbed for 66 million years you would have 8.673617379884E-17 of a percent left. Or 0.0000000000000000867% of the DNA left.
That is basically zero and that makes me very sad.
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