How to Make a Dinosaur

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How to Make a Dinosaur

• STEP 1) Find a piece of amber with a blood
  sucking insect from the dinosaur era trapped in
  it.
• STEP 2) Extract the blood that insect sucked
  from a dinosaur.
• STEP 3) Use the dinosaur's genetic code (DNA)
  found in the blood cells as blueprints for
  another dinosaur. If pieces of the DNA are
  missing, fill in the gaps with frog DNA.
• STEP 4) Use these blue prints to create a
  dinosaur egg.
• STEP 5) Hatch the dinosaur in an incubator.
• STEP 6) Raise the dinosaur to full size.
• STEP 7) Enjoy!

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• Could we really use this formula to recreate
  dinosaurs?
• If we can't today, could we reasonably expect
  our technology to get good enough that we could
  do it in the future?

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• Let's look at step one. The idea of getting
  dinosaur DNA from biting insects trapped in amber
  originated with George O. Poinar in the 1980's.
• Amber is fossilized tree sap. Usually it is clear
  with a yellowish tint. Sometimes insects are
  trapped in the tree sap before it hardens. Some
  amber dates from the Mesozoic Era when the
  dinosaurs lived and it is not impossible insects,
  carrying dinosaur blood, might be trapped in
  amber.
• Step one looks okay if we are willing to spend
  the time and money to search for the right pieces
  of amber.

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• Amber is extremely useful for ancient DNA
  research. In most fossilized bones the actual
  organic material has been replaced by minerals.
  Amber preserves the soft tissue of an animal,
  though, for vast amounts of time.

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• Step two is to remove the dinosaur DNA from the
  insect. DNA, often called the blueprint of life,
  is found in every cell in a living body. It is
  not unreasonable that we might be able to extract
  some dino DNA from the blood cells we recover.

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• After that, though, we run into trouble.
  Scientists have already extracted DNA fragments
  from an extinct weevil that was trapped in amber
  some 120 to 135 million years ago. Note that it
  was only a fragment of DNA of the weevil (less
  than one millionth of the entire sequence), and
  not the blood of something it bit.

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• A full set of DNA does carry the blue prints of
  the creature of which it is a part of. However,
  this code is made up of billions of individual
  "base pairs" (like letters in an alphabet) and
  the order of these are very important to the
  code.

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• DNA is relatively fragile and breaks down over
  time. The DNA we are likely to recover from the
  stomach of an insect will have disintegrated into
  tiny pieces and most of it will be missing.
  Unfortunately we cannot just replace the missing
  section with frog DNA. If we did that we would
  wind up with frog DNA with a few tiny dinosaur
  sections rather than dino DNA with a few frog
  sections.

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• It's going to be difficult for scientists to even
  be sure they have a fragment of dino DNA and not
  a part of the insect or contamination from
  something under the researchers fingernails.
  Remember nobody has ever seen dinosaur DNA before
  so we they can only identify it by comparing and
  contrasting it to DNA from animals alive today.

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• If we were going to fill in missing section of
  dinosaur DNA it would be more logical to borrow
  it from birds since they seem to be the closest
  living creatures to a dinosaur.

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• When we reach Step Three things really get
  difficult. DNA is often likened to a software
  program on a computer because it contains
  instructions on how to build a living creature.
  (Whereas the instructions in a computer program
  might tell the machine how to do your taxes.) To
  do something on a computer, though, you need not
  only the software, but the hardware (the computer
  itself) to run it. In the same way, we are
  missing the "hardware" needed to execute the DNA.

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• This would normally be a mommy dinosaur that
  produces an egg with the DNA in it. Unfortunately
  not any old chicken egg will do it. We need a
  dinosaur egg. Probably one from the same species
  we are trying to duplicate. Could we alter
  something like an Ostrich egg for this purpose?
  Maybe, but today we don't know how to do it, or
  what kind of changes are needed.

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• Assuming we do find some way past this obstacle,
  what's next? Hatching the dinosaur in an
  incubator. This we have plenty of experience
  with. If the eggs are good we can probably get
  them to hatch.

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• Now we have to raise our baby dinosaurs to
  adulthood. Our experience with raising other
  species will help. California condors in
  captivity were raised using puppets to play the
  parts of the parents. This way they did not get
  too comfortable with human beings and the
  transition to living on their own in nature was
  made easier. The logistics of providing an eighty
  foot long Apatasaurs puppet for this purpose
  might be difficult, but not insurmountable.

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• Still, we'd have to be concerned about the health
  of our dinosaur. What do we feed it? Many of the
  plants it ate back in the Mesozoic will be
  extinct themselves. What kind of new germs have
  developed in the past 65 million years to which
  our dinosaur has no resistance? What kind of
  medicine can we give our dinosaur if it gets
  sick? With no past history of dinosaur behavior
  to work from it will be hard to tell if our
  dinosaur is acting "normal" or not.

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• Even if we never are able to build a dinosaur
  from fossilized DNA scientists can still learn a
  lot about these creatures, and life in general by
  studying sections of ancient DNA to see how it
  has changed though the ages.
• And who knows? If we can get past all these
  obstacles perhaps we can someday build a
  dinosaur. Meanwhile, until we do, we'll have to
  be satisfied with watching them in the movies.

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• While getting DNA from dinosaurs is difficult,
  recovering it from more recently extinct species
  may be fairly easy. Hendrik Polinar of the
  University of Munich has managed to identify a
  Giant Sloth from the DNA in the creature's
  softball sized droppings. The dung was left in a
  cave near Las Vegas some 20,000 years ago. As
  time when on the DNA became "caramelized" as the
  protein and sugar molecules became intertwinded.
  This protected the DNA from decay. Polinar was
  able to later split the bonds and read the
  genetic sequences. Dispite the preservation much
  of the DNA material was still lost, though, and
  it seems unlikely that this process could be used
  to create a Giant Sloth for a "Jurassic Park."