I love how not only the time of existence but also its size and appearance are presented as undisputable facts.
Yeah and it's so wrong! Would they have checked the bible they'd agree that the earth is 6000 years old.
And flat obviously
Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
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Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#12> Yet first, paleontologists need to confirm that these possible genetic traces are the real thing. As is common with science articles, the headline doesn't quite match reality.
The headline says possible dinosaur DNA has been found, and that quote agrees that these samples are possibly dinosaur DNA. That seems to match.
Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#13This is a naive question...but let's just say we do have the DNA, is Jurrasic park possible with today's technology?! I remember reading that someone was trying to inseminate an elephant with mammoth sperm a couple years ago but failed. Not sure if it was because the sample was super old or it just doesn't work.
It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.
That is what was thought but if the finding in the article turns out to be true then that might need to be reevaluated.
Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#14This is a naive question...but let's just say we do have the DNA, is Jurrasic park possible with today's technology?! I remember reading that someone was trying to inseminate an elephant with mammoth sperm a couple years ago but failed. Not sure if it was because the sample was super old or it just doesn't work.
It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.
What if the DNA was frozen?
Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#15"At best, their biological makers seem to be degraded remnants of genes that cannot be read—broken-down components rather than intact parts of a sequence." So... what good does that do?
Homology studies. A DNA strand 17 bp long is pretty distinct. If a strand that long or longer was found, we would gain a lot of information about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs that we could never get from fossils.
However, the article isn't clear about what they found. It says DNA, then it says there may not be a recoverable sequence. In that case nucleic acids would be a better term than DNA. Without more info on what stain they used to identify the "DNA", the implications of this research are hard to figure out.
Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.
That is what was thought but if the finding in the article turns out to be true then that might need to be reevaluated.
The key is half-life. A few fragments of dinosaur DNA surely remain, because half-life means there is a certain probability of decay over a particular unit of time. But enough to re-assemble a dinosaur? That's unlikely to the point of near-impossibility.
Even if we got really really lucky and found some that had spent most of its existence frozen deep in Antarctica or something, that would only open the potential of restoring a single dinosaur lineage and not the vast array of species depicted in Jurassic Park. That's total fantasy.
Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#17Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#18> Yet first, paleontologists need to confirm that these possible genetic traces are the real thing. As is common with science articles, the headline doesn't quite match reality.
The headline says possible dinosaur DNA has been found, and that quote agrees that these samples are possibly dinosaur DNA. That seems to match.
Or bacterial DNA.
I think samples need to be isolated and sequenced before we know what we're dealing with.
Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#19Re: Possible dinosaur DNA has been found
#20This is a naive question...but let's just say we do have the DNA, is Jurrasic park possible with today's technology?! I remember reading that someone was trying to inseminate an elephant with mammoth sperm a couple years ago but failed. Not sure if it was because the sample was super old or it just doesn't work.
It's a completely impossible fantasy. DNA has a half life of ~500 years. Mammoths only died out around 10,000 years ago, which is why it's conceivable that one could be brought back, but all dinosaur DNA has been destroyed for millions of years.
You say this as an absolute, but this very article is describing a case where it might have been found.
It's unlikely, we'll see.