The revival of Dinosaurs using their DNA, fiction only?

Jurassic Park?

Published in

Predict

6 min readAug 20, 2021

T-Rex in bones looking at the camera — Photo by Scott Evans on Unsplash

So I recently watched Jurassic World, a dinosaur movie following in the tracks of the 90’s Jurassic Park series. In these movies, they used dinosaur DNA to revive them and have them shown to the public. While I was watching, I kind of hoped something like this would be possible. You know seeing a real dinosaur, these mythical creatures? That would be insanely cool! But then I asked myself, would it be wise? Should they stay in the ground like nature decided or do we do us and try to achieve the impossible? I think the latter is better in my opinion, who would pick the first option pfft. So then the big question: could we achieve that kind of fiction, could we use dinosaur DNA to revive them as they did?

First, what is DNA?

DNA which stands for Deoxyribonucleic Acid is a chemical that carries genetic instructions in all living things. It is a molecule that consists of two strands that wind around to form a shape known as a double helix. In short, it is what makes us, us. It’s the code that was programmed for us.

A blue picture of what resembles DNA in the form of a double helix — Photo by Pete Linforth under Pixabay License

Is it feasible?

We have already achieved DNA resurrection, not for a dinosaur but for an animal that died decades ago. We took the cells from the carcass and brought them back to life using today’s technology. It is then possible with modern science to resurrect animals that died decades ago and have them come back in the form of clones. Now we have also sequenced the genes of the Neanderthal man, meaning that at some point in the near future it may be possible to bring back the Neanderthal man. In fact, at Harvard University one professor even proposed as to how much it would cost to reassemble their genome. And then of course, if a young Neanderthal boy is born the question is where do you put the boy, in a zoo or at Harvard being experiment on? This is a question that we’re going to be facing in the coming decades because we might be able to even bring back the mammoths. We’re talking about creatures that walked the surface of the Earth tens of thousands of years ago and we have their genome. It’s a serious proposal now that we’re closing in on sequencing all the genes of a mammoth to bring it — by inserting a fertilized egg inside the womb of an elephant and having the elephant give birth to a mammoth (since they come from the same family tree).

Now dinosaurs are much much more difficult. They perished 65 million years ago, not tens of thousands of years ago (and don’t get me wrong, it’s still a long time ago). However, something has happened and that is we have soft tissues from dinosaurs. If you take a hadrosaurus and crack open the thigh bones, you will find soft tissue right there is the bone marrow. T-Rex’s too and scientists have analyzed not the DNA, but the proteins inside the soft tissue. Not surprisingly, we find the proteins of chickens and also frogs and reptiles, which means that dinosaurs we can now show biochemically are very closely related to birds. In fact, we think birds are dinosaurs that survived the cataclysm 65 million years ago.

Now there is another proposal (a very interesting one) to use what is called epigenetics. Nature does not simply throw away good genes. Nature simply decides to turn them off. For example, we have the genes in our own body that would put hair all over our body and you can actually turn that gene on and create “a werewolf”. In fact, in Mexico City are two young boys with hair all over their bodies that are acrobats in a circus, and scientists have sequenced the genes and yes, it is a very ancient gene that they have, fascinating.

With chickens, we can actually see the genes for chickens that were turned off because of epigenetics, genes that give them webbing between their toes because a long time ago they had webbed feet and also teeth, TEETH! With epigenetics, you can actually bring back teeth inside chickens.

So then the question is, is it possible to make the next big leap to use epigenetics, to use gene therapy, to use all the kinds of therapies we have, mix all these things up in the memory of a computer and have the computer give the best fit for a reptile that is like a dinosaur. Insert that perhaps, into the womb of maybe an alligator (like with the mammoths) and perhaps give birth to an egg which will hatch something resembling a dinosaur. Well sadly that’s not possible today, but it’s not out of the question. It’s not out of the question that at some point in the future we’ll use a computer to take all these bits of DNA from living lizards, maybe birds — extracting information from the proteins of soft tissue from hadrosaurs and assemble the best mathematical approximation to a dinosaur and have it give birth to an egg.

What about fossils like amber?

Fossils are the remains or impression of a prehistoric organism preserved in petrified form or as a mold or even cast in rock. In 1993, scientists cracked open a piece of amber dating from the prehistoric age and found a small insect that probably got itself trapped in sticky resin. They took its body and they sampled its DNA. At the time, this little guy was the oldest thing ever to have its DNA sampled. So the fact is, we can get the DNA of extinct organisms from some fossils. It’s fragmented, and it’s imperfect, but it’s possible. It’s just not possible for every type of fossil, and, most importantly, not from every time period. It took another few decades of research before scientists could figure out how we could truly unlock the genetic secrets of the past.

In the search for the oldest material, amber seemed like the best place to look. Amber traps organisms in a perfect medium for preservation. But that would be for insects, we want big dinosaurs! We know that DNA becomes unreadable in less than 6.8 million years and a lot of it becomes hard to analyze and thus makes it almost impossible for us to completely see.

Final conclusions

We have already proven that it is possible to extract DNA from old fossils. We found ways we could resurrect these beasts from the past. But it all comes from time and technology. In some cases, we could see this reality in a couple of decades and others maybe not. We have also discovered that some “dinosaurs” (and I mean birds) are still alive and that could potentially be of some assistance for us. Sometimes all it takes is a perfectly preserved fossil in our quest to immortality, no I’m just joking, to resurrection!