SIC-Dino Might

Science in the City

Dino-Might

DEAR SCIENCE WORLD,

Dear Science World,
Jurassic Park is my all-time favourite movie and I’m wondering, with all the advancements in science, would it be possible to bring back
a dinosaur?

Please Create Rex Dear PCR,

Great question PCR! As far as we know, nobody has yet recreated any prehistoric life forms. But will it be possible in the future? Let’s look at where science stands today—perhaps it’ll give you a better idea of how feasible it is to bring back an ancient extinct species.

What would we need in order to bring back a T. Rex? First, scientists would need to find an intact sample of dinosaur DNA. DNA, short for Deoxyribonucleic Acid, is the information code found in living organisms that tells the body how to operate. Attempting to reproduce a dinosaur without DNA would be like trying to write a book without letters.

The challenge is that DNA is contained in cells, and so far we don’t have dinosaur cells to work with. The skin and muscle of the dinosaurs decayed away millions of years ago, and the cells of their bones were replaced with minerals when they fossilized.

If dinosaur DNA were discovered, it would be millions of years old. After so much time, it would be unlikely to find an undamaged sample. Let’s just suppose a complete set of dino DNA was found or produced—what next? The DNA would need to be cloned in order to create a new dinosaur.

Scientists are able to clone an animal, but the process isn’t perfect. You have probably heard of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from a full-grown, adult donor. Dolly was the only live birth out of hundreds of attempts. She wasn’t healthy most of her life and died young for a sheep.

Scientists can’t be sure if the process of cloning caused Dolly’s poor health. But we can say that cloning is still not advanced and refined enough to clone a sample of multi-million year old DNA. There’s no need to stockpile steak for your new pet T. Rex just yet.

However, PCR, don’t give up on your Jurassic Park fantasy entirely. In January 2009, Spanish scientists were able to successfully clone DNA preserved from the last Pyrenean ibex, a mountain goat that went extinct in 2000. The good news: one baby goat was born. The bad news: the goat only survived for a few minutes before complications from a lung defect ended her life. Despite the unhappy outcome of this trial, it does show that science might be able to bring back extinct species in the near future.

We’ll just have to wait and see if animals that disappeared millions of years ago might come back as well. Stay tuned!

Scientifically Yours,
Deanna Wiebe, GENEious