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
Unfortunately it is true that dna is too unstable to survive that long, even in the most ideal storage conditions. Maybe they can find bits of ice age dna like colossial biosciences is working on, but t rex type dinos theres just no fesable way dna can survive that long.
Who knows though, maybe theres some other more esoteric way of measuring creatures of the past, that biologists have yet to figure out. Or if our simulations of evolution get sophisticated enough, we can run simulations of long periods of time in earth like conditions and see if something like dinosaurs emerge. That could give us clues as to what their dna would look like or what niches they occupied in the ecosystem
There is, theyre birds. Look up the chickenosaurus project. Birds are actually dinosaurs and with the right tweaking you can make them look like their old selves.
Currently the project has managed to grow a chicken with teeth, a snout instead of a beak, claws instead of wings, and a long tail. However they’ve hit a snag as the tail is stiff instead of flexible so they’re trying to figure that out.
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.
Unfortunately you are likely right that finding intact DNA will be pretty much impossible. The other issue is even with intact DNA, actually using it would be a bigger challenge. Because the DNA is just the blueprint, but it doesn’t provide the tools to bring back an entire lifeform from it. Mammoths at least if they found true DNA would have had the perk of a modern elephant probably could carry the first babies and we roughly have an idea of how to raise mammoths based on their very close relatives the elephants. No such luck with something as far removed as a dinosaur and turning that DNA into an intact egg, and that’s before we figure out how to incubate it, and how to raise the dino. We have very little idea of how each known dinosaur actually lived, what they truly ate, specific needs, how much of their survival was learned or taught by parents, etc
The more likely way we could reverse engineer dinosaurs is to start with their living descendants: birds.
They theoretically still have a significant portion of dinosaur DNA.
One thing to consider though is that the world is very different now to when there were dinosaurs. So even if we could revive dinosaurs as they were, they likely would not thrive as the world conditions are no longer optimal for them.
[This environmental DNA](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05453-y) is, as far as I know, the oldest DNA that’s ever been sequenced, about 2 million years. From what i can tell, it survived because it was both frozen and adsorbed onto the surface of rocks. The stuff that was successfully sequenced was about, they say, 50bp long.
I work in genomics. Thankfully I don’t have to sequence ancient DNA, but I have a colleague who sequences butterflies from museum collections and I can tell you on his behalf – sequencing old DNA is incredibly hard to do. It’s short, a lot of it is single stranded, there are nicks, some of the bases are chemically changed, and you have almost nothing to work with.
Normally when you sequence something, you break it up into millions of tiny ~150-300bp pieces, make billions of copies of those pieces, and then put it through a machine that tells you which base it reads, and then a very clever person has to use a lot of complicated informatics to put those tiny pieces together into the right order according to a reference. It’s like a jigsaw made of billions of letters.
Working with ancient DNA is like having a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are the size of a mustard seed, the edges are all broken so you can’t tell what fits where, you lost the picture on the box, and you have to do the puzzle perfectly on the first try because no one sells that puzzle any more.
Past much further than a few million years, all you’ll have left is single nucleotides (if that!), and that’d be like trying to write War and Peace by throwing a sack full of individual letters on the ground.
Mammoth DNA can sometimes been found though it’s mostly degraded, however it should be possible to find enough of it and piece together a complete strand.
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268417-first-million-year-old-dna-extracted-from-siberian-mammoth-teeth/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268417-first-million-year-old-dna-extracted-from-siberian-mammoth-teeth/)
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32432693](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32432693)
Most dinosaur fossils have been petrified so there’s only traces of the original material present. In the samples of actual remains found the DNA has almost always degraded. However [https://www.the-scientist.com/paleontologists-find-possible-dinosaur-dna-69346](https://www.the-scientist.com/paleontologists-find-possible-dinosaur-dna-69346)
I could see someday an extremely powerful AI computer could recreate dino DNA, but theres a 0% chance that any is still intact out there in the wild.
Most dinosaur fossils are mineral replacement fossils and the dna is long gone, only traces of the original organic materials remain. The rare, preserved dinosaur remains don’t normally yield much DNA and that degraded, however it’s not impossible [https://www.the-scientist.com/paleontologists-find-possible-dinosaur-dna-69346](https://www.the-scientist.com/paleontologists-find-possible-dinosaur-dna-69346)
Mammoths are a different story, most of their remains are original and the DNA is not fully gone so there are multiple fragments of the same species which could, in theory, be patched together to form a complete DNA strand [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32432693https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32432693](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32432693https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32432693)
and there’s a chance we could simply find a complete strand anyway [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268417-first-million-year-old-dna-extracted-from-siberian-mammoth-teeth/](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268417-first-million-year-old-dna-extracted-from-siberian-mammoth-teeth/)
I think a better method would be manipulating chicken DNA until you got something that looked more like a dinosaur. After all, birds literally are dinosaurs.
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