Did we learn our mistake from the jurassic park series?
In: Biology
Even ignoring the ethical and safety questions around a dinosaur-based theme park, the ability to clone dinosaurs just doesn’t exist and likely won’t, as far as we can tell. DNA breaks down over time, and even if it were preserved in amber (like in Jurassic Park), the soft tissues and DNA present in the sample will have degraded millions of years ago, leaving only a husk preserved in the amber. Under normal conditions, DNA completely breaks down over a few thousand years, let alone a scale of tens of millions. That’s not to say that we *couldn’t* find some unbelievably well-preserved dinosaur DNA in the future, but it seems very unlikely that it’s possible.
We’ve found some examples of extinct DNA in really specific conditions – like buried in permafrost, maintained at very low temperatures without ever warming up – but even then, the oldest I believe we’ve found is around a million years old. We’d need to find something 65x as old and perfectly preserved in order to even think about the possibility of dinosaur cloning.
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