Should we bring back the dinosaurs?

[Tex]

So in my high school Biology class, we are watching Jurassic Park as a way to introduce genetics and genetic engineering (and, unofficially, as a Christmas holiday treat).

In case you haven't seen it (I won't spoil, trust me ), a group of scientists have taken DNA from the blood found in prehistoric mosquitoes trapped in amber, used frog DNA to fill in the deteriorated gaps, and bred them, eventually releasing herds onto a very remote island.

This, combined with what happens as a result (lips are sealed), got me thinking: Should we, or shouldn't we, try this? Even on a smaller scale?

Personally, I think it would be a great idea to at least clone one or two to be kept in close captivity and under intense observation, both as a way to promote genetic engineering of organisms (If you support it) and allow people the chance to interact with a creature out of the gene pool for 65 million years. It's just freaking awesome to think that we are capable of it.

What?

Yes, a big word in the scientific community, for the past few years, anyway, is the discovery of a frozen, intact, wooly mammoth. Using the recoverable DNA, we can splice it into an elephant's eggs and bring back the Mammoth again.

What do you think? Would there still be complications, like (I'm not directly saying there is...) in the movie? Would it be cool anyway, if we didn't actually do it?

[Ravenchant]

Bringing the mammoth back is doable. Hard, yes, but doable. There are ethical issues (for example, whether it's acceptable to focus efforts on that when many species are going extinct right now), but personally? It would be nice to see a project like this succeed.

However, regarding the dinosaurs, prepare to have your bubble burst. It isn't possible to extract any meaningful data out of that, DNA has a half-life of less than a millenium. We're talking orders of magnitude greater than the last ice age, after all :/

[Moar Boosters]

Well we've already tried, sort of. The book was based on real life research. There were a few wild claims, but the general consensus was that you can't find usable dinosaur DNA in amber preserved mosquitoes. The filling in the gaps with frog DNA is pure fantasy.

Before recovering DNA from frozen mammoths, we've still got to get around the difficulty of cross-species gestation. There are better animals to try and reproduce..... ones that went extinct in recent history, such as the Pyrenaen Ibex, for whom we have perfect DNA samples. They got as far as creating cloned embryos which they implanted into another species of Ibex, but none of them survived long enough for birth.

[rpayne88]

If you wanted to bring back the dinosaurs, you would have to figure out time travel. And solve all the paradoxes and issues that go along with that.

Then, if you did bring some of them forward, you would still have an issue that is not seen in Jurassic Park. I once heard from my gastroenterologist that 98% of your body is made up of bacteria. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be the same with a T-Rex. That brings up an immunity issue. The bacteria that was around during the time dinosaurs were around is not the same that is around today. That means bacteria from them can spread to us, and potentially kill us. The reverse is also true, our bacteria could spread to them and overwhelm their immune system.

Also, there is the issue of public opinion. If you watched the movie stealth, you may know that some people thought the F-24 was a real aircraft used by the U.S. Navy. If you apply the same logic to any attempt to "revive" or "recover" a dino, the public may shut you down fearing a real world equivalent of Jurassic Park.

Finally, we do not know how to care for one. We likely won't be feeding them what they ate in the Cretaceous, or Jurassic (for cavernous ones, anyway.) Why? It would be a waste of samples that would have been used for scientific study. Also, we don't know if they could digest modern day foodstuffs like lettuce or beef. And if you don't know how to care for one, you may get organizations such as the humane society and PETA, although the Humane Society will likely be more forgiving to studying them.

I agree though, it would be neat if we could bring one to the 21st century.

[Tommygun]

There is another approach that some geneticists are looking into is what kind of information is in all that "junk DNA" all animals have, specifically birds.

The theory is that old dinosaurs DNA may still be there and is just unused and it may be possible to manipulate it.

Another approach is making reproduction dinosaurs by manipulating bird DNA to reproduce a bird that has all the same characteristics as the original creature.

Something like an ostrich into a velociraptor.

I think it could be a useful approach to bringing back extinct species, but there is still an issue of where to put them if their habitat is gone.

This type of medical technology has a lot more useful benefits in the everyday world of course, but it would be an interesting experiment.

[K^2]

Information you can get from junk DNA of a single species is very limited, and unfortunately, there are some major bottlenecks between modern birds and what most people think of as dinosaurs. It's much easier to get to the common ancestor. So, for instance, I think we'd have a very good shot at scraping up a fairly complete picture of what Archaeopteryx DNA looked like.

The biggest limitation is in our ability to tell a functional protein from a broken one. As we improve our ability to fold proteins, we'll be able to start processing all this information to sort through junk DNA. Dinosaurs are still going to be very complicated, though. I'd have to make some estimates to say anything specific, but if I had to guess, I'd say we don't have enough sources to look back from to gather a good enough sample. We'd need other source, and perhaps an ability to fill in the gaps based on what we think is missing.

P.S. Any scientific question that starts with, "Should we," is answered with "Yes." There is absolutely no research that shouldn't be done. Some of it needs to be done with great care. In this case, most dinosaur species wouldn't survive well enough to present any kind of a threat. So the Jurassic Park (I'm talking series overall) sort of disaster isn't going to happen.

There is a danger of re-introducing an ancient virus which would be hiding in genetics of one of these beasts. It'd be really rotten luck, and even then, it should only have a chance of affecting avians, but it's something to take precautions for anyways.

Edited December 20, 2013 by K^2

[maccollo]

Well birds are dinosaurs, and their basic anatomy is very similar to their theropod ancestors. Many of the genes for major features like tails and teeth are simply dormant.

So it is conceivably possible to re-engineer chickens with breeding and gene modifications into something that closely resembles something like a dromaeosaur.

Jack Horner, a pretty well known palientologist, is actually trying to do that.

However, whatever comes out of this, if anything comes out from this at all, wont be any extinct species of dinosaur no matter how closely they resemble each other in appearance.

But birds are dinosaurs, so it would be some kind of dinosaur.

[Pyre]

Like I am going to say no to a pet chickenraptor. I'll call it Fluffy!

In all seriousness, I see no reason not to. Worst case, we can't make a viable dinosaur analog, but gain more knowledge and experience manipulating DNA, which can only benefit humanity. Best case, pet dinosaurs.

[Superluminaut]

If you are interested in this subject I recommend the book. In the book the dinosaurs are actually a miscreant genetic hodgepodge. More like a real life attempt at this would probably result.

And Grant likes kids!!

If we tried to do it, it would be through revers engineering a bird. The "dinosaur" would only be a novel creature, any study of it could not be generalized to the population 65 million years ago and beyond.

The biggest problem would likely not be pulling together the appropriate genes, but producing the dynamic environment required for proper embryo development.

Should we do it? Yes, practice makes perfect.

[jwenting]

I ate grilled dinosaur last night. Bought it at the supermarket labelled "chicken", was delicious.

[ZetaX]

I once heard from my gastroenterologist that 98% of your body is made up of bacteria.

No it isn't. They outnumber your cells, but your mass is mostly yours. Quoting Wikipedia:

"The mass of microorganisms are estimated to account for 1-3% total body mass."

and

"Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, and there are at least ten times as many bacteria as human cells in the body (approximately 10^14 versus 10^13)".

[Minecrafter1]

It's an interesting question to ask the following : what is the absolute best you could do?

Suppose you had a molecular scan of all of earth (you basically scanned every last bit of solid rock on the earth's crust and blade of grass to atomic levels of detail). You would have a precise scan of every remaining fossil in existence, and any fragments of DNA remaining, no matter how small.

For every dinosaur fossil we have found, there must be thousands or millions of them yet to be discovered. The earth is a big place, and the ground goes down for many miles. Even if there's only enough fragments of DNA left to find a few base pairs every time you find a fossil, there are a large number of fossils.

Also, if you could get even a fragmentary map of a particular dinosaur's genome, you could compare it to all the genomes of the existing life that was on this planet (before you tore it all to pieces to make your molecular scan, of course)

Some times, you would be able to figure out via modeling genetic drift and protein functionality what a particular protein's gene would have been.

Once you have done that, you have to somehow go from this still very fragmentary map full of holes and guesses to a possible mapping for a creature that would have produced the skeleton you found as a fossil when it died.

It would also have to be able to survive in what you modeled the ecosystem to be like during the era.

With all this, the solution space remaining, from converging all these different constraints, is not infinitely large. It might be small enough that you could make a few "example" dinosaurs from this solution space describing all the dinosaurs that might have been, and these dinosaurs would be similar enough to one another that you would feel ok with saying they were more or less accurate to what they were originally like.

I'm kinda assuming the computers needed to do these calculations are massing as much as entire planets, and are super-intelligent beings of their own right.

You'd build a big theme park, floating out in space in an O'Neil habitat (remember we had to destroy the earth to map it, so no point in moving back in). This would at least solve the immunity issue - your artificial habitat could be made completely sterile of all modern earth bacteria. Of course, it must be said, the dinosaurs you created would turn out to have near human intelligence (oopsie!) and would run amock, predictably, slaughtering the robotic operators of the theme park and taking over.

[ZedNova]

No, the only reason we're here is because they're dead. We didn't make them go extinct, nature did, i think we should only attempt to bring back animals that humans have helped make extinct. ( Tasmanian tiger, dodo's, steller's sea cow ect. )

EDIT:

I also disagree with bringing back a neanderthal man.

[-Velocity-]

Non-avian dinosaurs cannot be brought back. Their DNA is gone. Maybe we could artificially engineer a critter (probably, starting with some kind of bird) into something that looked like an ancient dinosaur.

Of course, dinosaurs didn't die out entirely- thankfully!- theropod dinosaurs are still alive and well. That birds are in fact, dinosaurs has now become accepted as effectively proven, a scientific fact. This follows after the discovery of numerous feathered dinosaurs and some creatures that we can't even tell if they really birds or dinosaurs. The line separating dinosaurs and birds is not just blurred, it is erased. For example, while Jurassic Park shows "raptors" as being lizard-like, we now know that they were, in fact covered in feathers, and it's a little questionable whether we should call their forelimbs "wings" or "arms". It seems likely that dromaeosaurids and birds shared a common ancestor, though it's hard to say if we would have properly considered that ancestor a bird or a dinosaur. So it's even possible that dromaeosaurids ("raptors") were really more like primitive birds that evolved "backwards", back into a flightless form. (That hypothesis would explain why dromaeosaurids, while being the most bird-like of the non-avian dinosaurs, actually existed after birds had already evolved.)

Anyway, even if it were possible to bring back the non-avian dinosaurs and we did it, dinosaurs would be ill-suited to today's world. Modern mammals and birds are faster, smarter, and better adapted. Even when dinosaurs ruled supreme, mammals were slowly making ground against them. They've even discovered mammalian predators that ate some of the smaller dinosaurs. After a 66 million-year time out, dinosaurs wouldn't stand a chance. They'd also be subject to a huge range of new diseases that they have no immunity to, and we would also need to bring back the bacteria that helped dinosaurs survive if we expected them to actually live for any length of time.

So yea, T-Rex could rip a lion, or a zebra or a gazelle to shreds, but good luck catching one, considering he was likely limited to a top speed of like 25 km/h (any faster, and tripping and falling becomes fatal- it's not like he had arms or hands to break his fall). Even if the T-Rex was capable of moving faster, most mammals would still be either faster or better at hiding and out-smarting him.

In other words, it's hopelessly impossible, and even if it wasn't, it would only end in failure anyway. Our better bet is to genetically reverse-engineer birds, whom still have a lot of the DNA coding for various primitive dinosaurian features, just, not expressed.

Edited December 20, 2013 by |Velocity|

[maccollo]

No, the only reason we're here is because they're dead. We didn't make them go extinct, nature did, i think we should only attempt to bring back animals that humans have helped make extinct. ( Tasmanian tiger, dodo's, steller's sea cow ect. )

Well... again, using breeding and genetic modification to accelerate the process would not be bringing back any extinct species of dinosaur. If derived from chickens the new species would be a subset of chickens.

However dodos were birds, and birds are dinosaurs, so bringing back the dodo from reconstructed DNA would be bringing back an specific extinct species of dinosaur.

[Comrade Jenkens]

Due to the fact that soft dinosaur tissue was recently found inside fossils I believe that it may be possible to bring them back in the future. (Though the DNA may be too broken down to be of any use.) However I don't think that they should be brought back as earth is no longer suited to them.

[Camacha]

Anyway, even if it were possible to bring back the non-avian dinosaurs and we did it, dinosaurs would be ill-suited to today's world. Modern mammals and birds are faster, smarter, and better adapted. [...] After a 66 million-year time out, dinosaurs wouldn't stand a chance.

You are making a classic mistake by viewing evolution as a forward movement or development. On a small timescale that might be somewhat true, but on a larger timescale that gets lost. Things interact and change, but do not necessarily improve. The mere fact that whales walked on land shows this. They were great swimmers before they got to land, they are now. In between they were not, so it is hard to call that a continuous line of improvement. They are changes, but it does not automatically mean the new whale is better than the original water creature it was a long time ago.

There is no reason to assume modern birds are faster or better than their equivalents back then. The same goes for any other species. Now is just an arbitrary point in time, neither an end point nor an ultimate form of life.

For that matter, we will defenitely go extinct one day, probably because we evolved into something else. That is pretty much how it works; you evolve or you die out.

[Klingon Admiral]

Why should we bring back the dinosaurs? They did never go, currently there are about 10,000 different species as dinosaurs, ranging from semi-aquatic to terrestial the air-based lifestyles. They are currently the largest group of tetrapods (and the second largest group of chordates, after fish), and a few species have in recent times become very close to humanity.

We call them birds.

[MC.STEEL]

DNA has a ''halflife'' of 500 years or so (could be wrong you know)

so for something that lived that far of in the past the genetic material will be totaly imposible to recreate

whe could however make something from scratch that closely resembles dino's

Edited December 22, 2013 by MC.STEEL

[78stonewobble]

As most have pointed out it would be nigh impossible, but on the question on whether we should do it, IF we could?

Yes, we should.

Obviously not to release them into the wild or the streets of a typical american city, but the opportunity to observe a live dinosaur and to be able to look at the non fossilized parts better is a huge thing towards understanding the animals better.

[Seret]

I ate grilled dinosaur last night. Bought it at the supermarket labelled "chicken", was delicious.

This. No need to "bring back" dinosaurs, there are probably some just outside your window right now.

As for bringing back the non-avian dinosaurs, that ain't going to happen. Insects do get preserved in amber, the DNA from the blood of their last meal doesn't. There have been numerous attempts to salvage DNA from the few soft tissue samples we've found, none have worked. And even if you did manage to get a viable genome, you're still a long-long way from having a viable dinosaur. We have our own genome on file, but we can't just make people on demand.

[The Jedi Master]

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is actually possible to extract dino DNA from mosquitos and fill in the gaps with frog DNA. So you bring back the dinosaurs.

Now what?

I honestly do not see any practical purpose for them. They can't be domesticated, unleashing them on the battlefield would be a very bad idea, they're too dangerous to keep in zoos (sorry, Zoo Tycoon), and SCIENCE! is only a valid reason for anything in KSP.

[Galacticruler]

There is TRILOGY of movies as to why we SHOULD NOT bring them back.

[maccollo]

So you bring back the dinosaurs.

Now what?

Money, money and yet more money and publicity and science.

They can't be domesticated

That may or may not be true. How do you know?

unleashing them on the battlefield would be a very bad idea

Yes... That is indeed a bad idea. Why on earth would you release such a priceless project onto a battlefield where they would just run around scared and confused before getting killed?

they're too dangerous to keep in zoos

You watched to many movies. Dinosaurs were animals, and they would be no more dangerous than modern animals, they will not smash through steel fences.

There is TRILOGY of movies as to why we SHOULD NOT bring them back.

There's been a series of movies as to why we should not go to space. It caries the same amount of merit.

Edited December 24, 2013 by maccollo

[The Jedi Master]

Money, money and yet more money and publicity and science.

This mentality killed many a scientist.

That may or may not be true. How do you know?

The same logic as trying to domesticate a wild wolf. If you've ever heard stories of people trying to domesticate wolf hybrids, you know what I mean.

Why on earth would you release such a priceless project onto a battlefield where they would just run around scared and confused before getting killed?

Supposedly to eat the other guy.

Your last point has me beat, though.