Two things. First, Cecil points out that dinosaur fossils are actually lithic casts of the original bone and that you would not expect any original organic material to remain. Reasonable enough, except that against all expectations that’s exactly what happened: traces of collagen have been recovered from dinosaur bones, so it’s not completely off the wall that enough DNA might remain that one could (with much better technology than currently exists) recover a dinosaur genome. Secondly, Jurassic Park pointed out that blood-feeding insects preserved in amber might include dinosaur blood, though admittedly there are problems with that approach as well.
Recent findings of preserved protein etc have been quite surprising, but still the limiation is not chiefly the technology, it’s the durability of DNA itself.
Sure are - insects preserved in amber are most often not really preserved insects at all - they’re insect-shaped voids in the amber, lined with a carbonized film that is formed from the extremely decomposed remains of the organism
However, let’s pretend that we’ve solved all of the technical scientific problems and we have our pterodactyls or mammoths or T. Rex’s or whatever.
What would we do with it?
I would imagine that just releasing them into the wild would be wholly irresponsible for a myriad of reasons. Giving one over to Richard Branson strikes me as just as bad, if not worse an idea.
So what’s left? Zoos? Just kill it and dissect it? What?
If we had the level of bioengineering necessary to resurrect dinosaurs, I think we’d probably do the following first:
[ul]
[li]Resurrect as many species as possible that have gone extinct in the last 500-1000 years; provided of course the habitats they lived in are still there. That’s going to be the big issue- what would be the point of resurrecting, say, Elephant Birds if their original habitat in Madagascar is long gone?[/li][li]If there’s simply nowhere for resurrected species to exist and extant species are already dying out, we would probably keep a “virtual” population going: maintain a gene bank of as many genomes as possible, with a sub-viable number of individuals actually existing at any one time in zoos and preserves. Hoping against hope that someday, eventually, there’d be someplace for the species to be restored to.[/li][li]A big debate over whether we should even try to bring back the species that became extinct at the end of the last ice age- mammoths, giant ground sloths, etc. Some people have already proposed that we should try to restore America’s lost Pleistocene fauna with comparable substitutes. At this point it wouldn’t be a case of trying to “right an ecological wrong” but making a value judgement over what ecosystems should be put in place.[/li][li]Prehistoric (>20,000 years BCE) animals would almost certainly not fit into a modern world- they would be in competition with other species we want to keep in existence. So special-purpose created as attractions for zoos or whatnot. Maybe thousands of years from now if we have the ability to engineer giga-structures like world-sized space habitats, we might create “worlds” for them.[/li][/ul]
Well, there is the pretty huge ethical issue of returning a long-extinct animal back to life for the sole purpose of caging it and putting it on display for our entertainment.
I don’t see any ethical issue. Unless you are opposed to zoos for all animals, the breeding of one for captivity is no different than the breeding of another for captivity. Returning an animal from extinction should have no impact on the ethics of how it is treated once it was born. For the record, I would imagine mammoths in captivity would not be kept in cages, but at some kind of wild animal park.
Would it make you feel better if we returned a long-extinct animal back to life for the sole purpose of serving it in restaurants?
As much as I personally enjoy the zoo, yes, it is unethical to keep animals in that manner. They are there primarily to be on display for entertainment, yours and mine, not for their benefit, no matter how you slice it.
I saw that yesterday on a “weird news” site I frequent. At *first *(only at first) I did think it kinda looked elephantine. But on closer inspection I too thought: Brown Bear with Fish. It is certainly convenient that it is so out of focus. But looking at it closely, you can absolutely see a big difference between the “trunk” and the animal.
Some of those preserved T. rex soft tissues the OP mentions are right here, at the Museum of the Rockies. And from what I understand, they have, in fact, managed to extract fragments of DNA from it, though only fragments.
And they only found it because they accidentally broke the bone open, so it’s conceivable that there might be semi-intact material yet to be found in other dinosaur bones, too.
Indeed. All the DNA gives you is essentially the blueprints for building an organism, not the materials, tools, procedures, assembly instructions or anything else necessary. If we found the blueprints for a real flying saucer made by aliens more advanced than we, we most likely couldn’t actually build it because we don’t have the materials, construction techniques and so on.
I’ve heard the “DNA is useless without the right egg to put it in” argument, and I’m not convinced. For one thing we aren’t going to be simply copying sight unseen a presumably intact genome- more like we’re going to be reconstructing it from fragments and in some cases educated guesses. At that level of bioengineering we’re going to be more or less reverse-engineering how an entire organism works at the cellular-molecular level. To take the case of dinosaurs, we’d start by completely reverse-engineering a crocodile and an ostrich, so that we know exactly how you build either. Then using those templates as guides and what dinosaur DNA was available, we’d more or less infer how to end up with a dinosaur. More modern animals with closer living relatives would be much easier.
People are routinely having their deceased pets cloned. I say routinely because there is a reality show about it on TLC, apparently the spots come out exact and everything.
Point being we’re already a LONG way from Dolly the sheep. Whether that means Woolly Mammoths or elephants with engineered fur in our future who knows, but the business model of cloning for luxury already exists.
And so does the reality show about it. Your guess which is more disturbing.
I would say the opposite is true. Zoos are critical to the preservation, breeding and reintroduction of extremely endangered species. The displays are great educational tools.
I recall a method discussed decades ago. Genetic material from a mammoth other than sperm would be used to impregnate an elephant. It also would take several generations to get something approaching a mammoth. Once you have a female hybrid, you do the process again and the next generation is 75% mammoth DNA and 25% elephant and then next generation is only 12.5% elephant, etc.
Still, the question is why. People object enough to testing lipstick on monkeys. Recreating a species to live out its existence as a lab rat and curiosity with little likely benefit seems a waste. It is unlikely it could ever be introduced into any ecosystem and we do little to preserve the habitats of the creatures living now.
We artificially engineer the genes of cows, pigs and chickens every day for no bettter reason than they taste good. I really don’t think the “back from extinction” argument is relevant; if mammoths taste good, why would that be any less of a justification than breeding a yummy steer?