There has been much discussion regarding the revival of extinct species- reviving the thylacines, mammoths, even ancient plant species has been discussed…in some cases, it looks feasible.
But what of ancient species that have no surviving DNA to replicate? Take the trilobites (extinct for 100 million years). We have fossils of them, and we know a great deal about how they lived. Cold we take a modern insect species and “breed it back” to something resembling an ancient trilobite? Could we manipulate an existing specie’s DNA , so as to introduce modifications, to get a modern trilobite?
In any case, how would such a hypothetical project procedd? Would it have any chance of success? Or would it be impossible?
Given sufficient understanding of exactly how a genome becomes a creature (it’s really complex), we could design something that looks like a trilobite, however, there would be no guarantee that its genome would resemble that of the original trilobites even slightly.
It strikes me as completely impossible. Trilobites are arthropods, but they are very distantly related to extant arthropods. They split from other arthropods right near the beginning of all animal life, and then evolved on their own course for several hundred million years. My WAG is that humans are much more closely related to a starfish than any crustacean to a trilobite.
There is some work in “ancestral genome reconstruction”, but I don’t think it’s advanced enough to go that far back. Even with further developments in genome reconstruction algorithms, I think that far too much information has been lost forever. At best, we could probably infer that the last common ancestor of all arthropods had genetic pathways to develop a segmented critter with appendages and a head.
You would start with a horseshoe crab, but how one figures out what to do from there is beyond me.
Trilobites are their own class and may be a super-class depending on how they’re considered to relate to other arthropoda. It’s doubtful that living arthropods could be backbred into anything like a trilobite; at most a genetic comparison between different living arthropods might give clues to how they might have developed. You’d need to recover DNA from trilobite fossils, which is extremely doubtful.
ETA: what **lazybratsche **said.
Multiply that by 2.5.
You might be able to breed a pseudo-trilobite out of a horseshoe crab. In other words, a critter that strongly resembles a trilobite but is really a chelicerate Although considering that horseshoe crabs have avoided major anatomical changes due to natural selection for about 450 million years, I’m not sure artificial selection would be much more successful.
I once saw an exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History comparing and contrasting trilobites and horseshoe crabs, and was surprised to see how closely horseshoe crabs really do resemble trilobites in many details of their anatomy. as has been twice pointed out above, if you were going to try to replicate a trilobite, you’d start with a horseshoe crab, because it is indeed the closest living relative. I’m just surprised at how little would have to be changed. But it’s not like trying to retrieve a wooly mammoth from an elephant – the split in that case was far more recent and involved fewer changes.
You couldn’t do this by any sort of cross-breeding. It would involve some future tech and a lot of inference and guesswork – we don’t AFAIK, have any sort of trilobite genetic material to go by. This is still well inthe realm of science fiction.
If you just want a creature that looks kind of like a trilobite, we already have those:
I don’t think any modern phylogenies agree about which living animals are the closest relative to the trilobite. Basically some people think that trilobites are more related to arachnids and pycnogonads (chelicarates), others think trilobites are related to crustaceans and hexapods. Without molecular evidence, I don’t think we’ll ever unambiguously know the origin of trilobites (says the molecular biologist).
It seems at the very least that even crustaceans and the superficially similar horseshoe crab diverged from trilobites way back at the beginning of animal evolution, and prior to good fossil evidence.
If this trilobite-recreation project really gets underway, the State of Ohio will be backing it to the hilt: http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/Ohio/fossil-trilobite.html
I for one would support flooding the entire State of Ohio to restore it to the prime trilobite habitat it once was.
Well, that’s not very nice…!
Have you tried shaking it? I’d probably start with shaking it.
Oh, and you’d just kick the poor trilobites to the curb? It’s not their fault Ohioans moved in during their brief existential hiatus.
Hey, it’s a big state, and I don’t see their name on it.
Now I’ll know who to blame for the trilobite apocalypse.
As I said, there was an exhibit at Harvard comparing trilobites with horseshoe crabs. You might be using a more technical definition of “superficially”, but the resmblances are pretty deep, and go far beyond “they kinda look the same”.
Did anybody besides mean read the Thread Title as: “How Would Scientists Recreate The Tribbles?”
No.
(:p)