Dear Gene-ous:

Jurassic Park is my favourite movie of all time 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 I’m sure you are aware, at the moment it is certainly not possible to bring back the dinosaurs. But, will it be possible in the future? Hmmm. It is difficult to predict where science will be 50 to 100 years down the road. But let’s look at where science stands today. Perhaps it may 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. If dinosaur DNA was discovered, it would be millions of years old; after so much time it is very unlikely that the sample would be well-preserved and undamaged. So far there have been no confirmed findings of dinosaur DNA since most cells that would contain DNA are long gone.

If 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.  Cloning an animal is something that scientists are currently able to do but the process isn’t perfect. You have probably heard of Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from a full-grown, adult donor. Dolly was the only live birth out of hundreds of attempts. She was not healthy most of her life and died at an age much younger than normal. The process of cloning may be blamed for her poor health, of that we cannot be sure. But we can say that cloning is still not at the place it would need to be in order to clone a sample of multi-million year old DNA.

However, there is hope that the technology to bring back extinct species may not be too far off. In January of 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. Unfortunately, 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 will have to wait and see if animals that disappeared millions of years ago might come back as well.

Stay tuned…!

Sincerely,

Deanna Wiebe
(aka. Gene-ous)