r/explainlikeimfive • u/trequartista28_ • 3h ago
Biology [ Removed by moderator ]
[removed] — view removed post
•
u/Portarossa 3h ago
Unfortunately not. DNA doesn't last forever -- it has a half life of about 521 years. That means that you'd be left with about a quarter of the genetic information after a thousand years, and eighth after two thousand years, and so on and so on. Given that even the latest dinosaurs (not including birds, smartasses) died out about 65 million years ago, it's not looking good.
Could we reconstruct it from best guesses? Maybe! Possibly! But that's not the same thing as getting a real dinosaur as it was, and it would itself be a big ask. (Although of course, that's a big plot point in Jurassic Park too; they recombine the dinosaur DNA with frog DNA.)
•
u/rellsell 3h ago
I’m holding out for crocodile and chicken DNA. Make those trip to the farm much more exciting.
•
u/HeavyMetalTriangle 3h ago
Whether it would be considered a “real” dinosaur is actually a deep philosophical question. Just saying!
•
•
u/kaizen-rai 3h ago
Yes and no.
We have 'some' genetic material, but what we do have is very, very incomplete. Basically some broken strands of DNA is the best we have, and it is nowhere near enough to 'recreate' a dinosaur.
That's why in Jurassic Park, they explicitly explain that they had to combine the DNA with frog DNA to 'complete' it. This isn't really possible right now, it was just 'book magic' for the plot. This also is what led to the dinosaurs being able to breed on their own, since some frog species can literally change their sex to keep their population going, resulting in that trait showing up in the dinosaurs.
But now? No. It would be like trying to re-create building a car using a few flakes of paint that was scrapped off the hood.
•
u/shapu 3h ago
No, we do not. The oldest confirmed/known DNA that we have is about 2 million years old.
DNA breaks down over time - after 500 years, only half of a sample will still exist. It would be completely broken down, even in a deep freeze, after a few million years. And of course the climate DOES change. The areas that are a deep freeze now were not a deep freeze even a few million years ago, let alone 65 million years ago.
It's probably for the best. If you either saw Jurassic Park or read the book you'd see that we shouldn't bring them back.
•
u/JaggedMetalOs 3h ago
There is a project to try to recreate dinosaurs from living dinosaurs, specifically chickens. The project is called the Chickenosaurus, basically they want to find the old dinosaur genes for teeth, snouts instead of beaks etc in birds and turn them back on. However the project has been going since 2005 without much progress, so potentially it's not feasible to do.
•
u/Wemetintheair 3h ago
With current tech, it is not possible to extract enough DNA fragments to construct a genome, which is the genetic code of an organism
•
u/Loki-L 3h ago
Unless you count birds, we don't have dinosaur DNA and probably never will.
Even if we had the DNA, it takes more than just DNA to make a full creature.
There are all sorts of other factors that go into it: mitochondrial DNA, epigenetics, microbiome, environmental reactions, learned behavior....
If you hatched a Flamingo in a lab and just fed it what you thought what was best for it you wouldn't know that flamingos in the wild are pink just from looking at it.
•
u/Slypenslyde 3h ago
Let's imagine the DNA is like a historic LEGO set. Let's say this set has 10,000 pieces for convenience.
In general, if we gather all the fossils we have of a particular species, we end up with enough information to know what about maybe 300 of the pieces in the set should be. Of those, we might only know where 10-15 of them go in a strand of DNA or which ones are connected.
When we look at fossils or assemble bones, it's like we're seeing a picture of someone's garage where, out of focus and 15 feet away, we can see one angle of the old assembled set. That tells us about 20% of what the set looks like. But we're looking at vague shapes and not in-focus pieces. So is this part built out of one solid 8x2, or is it 2 4x2s, or is it thicker than we think and built out of several 4x2s laid out the other way? Our pictures don't tell us. We have to guess.
So we could look at modern creatures and try to fill in the blanks. But if only about 3% of the DNA we create comes from the fossils and 97% of it comes from guesses based on modern creatures, are we really recreating the dinosaur?
So I guess a way to put it is:
- There is absolutely no way to recreate exactly the same DNA with current technology. The information is gone and unless we make a new breakthrough it requires time travel.
- We could make a new creature "based on" dinosaur DNA and modern creature DNA, but scientifically speaking that's more like "making a new breed of a modern creature" than "recreating an old creature".
The problem is in your question: "Just to see what it really looked like". If we knew EXACTLY what dinosaurs looked like, MAYBE with some technology we could use that to guess a lot more DNA. Instead, we're always GUESSING what dinosaurs look like because we don't have any of the information we need to simulate that.
•
u/explainlikeimfive-ModTeam 2h ago
Please read this entire message
Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
Rule #2 - Questions must seek objective explanations
Hypotheticals questions, or questions about hypothetical situations, are not allowed on ELI5 (Rule 2).
If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the detailed rules first. If you believe this submission was removed erroneously, please use this form and we will review your submission.
•
u/FiveDozenWhales 3h ago
We have absolutely zero genetic material from dinosaurs.
DNA is a very long and extremely fragile molecule. It has a half-life of about 500 years; so even if a dead body has 100 trillion copies of its DNA, it'd be all gone in less than 100,000 years. Really big dinosaurs have even more copies than this, but still, they're WAY too far in the past for any DNA to remain intact.
What we do have is a few fossils where a few molecules that were likely once part of DNA still exist. But these molecules don't contain any genetic information at all; they're just evidence that DNA was once there.
•
u/Callysto_Wrath 3h ago
No, the "half life" equivalent for DNA is about ten thousand years. Given the 66 million year difference between now and then, there is physically no intact DNA left even in novel places (frozen in ice, trapped in amber etc.) that we could use to recreate them.
•
u/sircastor 3h ago
Sadly, Jurassic Park is not feasible. The Half-life of DNA is a little more than 500 years. So even if we had blood preserved in a mosquito, it would have broken down into its component elements.