I don't think it's this simple. The structure of the egg and uterine environment play important roles in development. It's like a programming language with a compiler written in it's own language. Losing the living animals is like losing the compiler. Using a related animal is like using a fork of the lost compiler to recompile the lost compiler. If that fork has changed something you'll end up with something slightly different than the lost one.
What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
31–40 of 147 posts
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#32Pedantically, we don’t need to bring back the dinosaurs since they are already here. All birds are dinosaurs. If we want to bring back the non-avian dinosaurs, cause a mass extinction of mammals (we are doing a great job at that) and then wait millions of years.
We want Ornitishian dinosaurs, too.
Sauropods, particularly. And while we are at it, pterosaurs, which are not dinosaurs, and mosasaurs, likewise. All are equally plausible, meaning not.
The original article is actually promoting inventing new animals that look like dinosaurs. Or rather what we guess they looked like. We might be able to do that, someday.
Anything that looks like a sauropod would need solutions for all the problems anything sauropod-shaped would necessarily have had, and solved. There is no reason to think our solutions would match what they had, but we could anyway determine whether they were plausible solutions. My bet is on two-chambered auxiliary hearts all the way up the neck. (The null hypothesis is a volkswagen-sized heart and very, very thick artery walls, assuming new circulatory structures were out of reach.)
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#33Dinosaurs are gone, all that remains is their bone structures. No complete genomes are recoverable, just maybe a few fragments. However if you want dinosaur-like creatures, you're basically talking giant flightless birds. So, start with something like an ostritch or a rhea, and use CRISPR to make selective edits aimed at increasing leg size and bone density. This would require a comprehensive understanding of develop…
Complete layman here. -- What about trying to reconstruct a likely common ancestor of reptiles and birds on the DNA level and combining this with the Parent's approach?
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#34I remember in the 90s, when they cloned Polly (or Molly? I don’t remember), people predicted crazy future where we keep cloning animals and one day maybe humans.
I don’t hear much about cloning recently. What happened?
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like gpt.
And it is a new account. What is the point?
To say one thing, then do the opposite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953823
clever-hans 4 hours ago | undown [flagged] | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Ask HN: Should HN ban ChatGPT/generated responses?
I agree that ChatGPT/generated responses should be banned on HN. It undermines the integrity of the platform and goes against the spirit of genuine discussion and collaboration. Let's not turn HN into a spammy bot-infested wasteland.
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#36I find it fascinating that we may be able to clone extinct species, but I agree with the warnings about the dangers of de-extinction. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. It's important to consider the potential consequences of bringing back ancient species, both for the animals themselves and for the ecosystem. It's also worth noting that even if we are able to successfully clone a dinosaur, it's…
Let’s build huge new habitats for them in orbit.
That's been done!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_on_a_Spaceship
>"Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" is the second episode of the seventh series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who. It first aired on BBC One in the UK on 8 September 2012 and on BBC America on the same date in the United States. It was written by Chris Chibnall and directed by Saul Metzstein.
>The episode features alien time traveller the Doctor (Matt Smith) and his companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) accompanied by Rory's father, Brian (Mark Williams), Queen Nefertiti (Riann Steele), and John Riddell, a British big-game hunter (Rupert Graves). The group lands on a large spaceship that contains dinosaurs and discover that it is a Silurian ark, though the Silurians have been murdered by Solomon (David Bradley), a black market trader who is intent on finding something of value.
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#37I love thought experiments like these, One would have to think where could ancient dinosaur DNA survive? Antarctica has been covered by ice for 5 million years, that is still 60 million years too young. Maybe there are a few bugs that have dino dna that is better preserved than the stuff that has been exposed to sunlight and elements the past 5 million years. And even if there is viable dna you would have to drill down 13-15k feet of solid ice to the antarctic landmass, which might as well be impossible(if you knew exactly where to look).
And lets say you bring the dinosaurs back, what was the air and temperature like for them? back >65mya earth had 30% oxygen(its 21% today) that much oxygen would be hard to deal with for humans today(cuts would heal in a day though!), also forest fires would be uncontrollably bad. And what about the temperature? It would be 10 degrees warmer than it is today. So you would have to alter the climate and atmosphere significantly for your newly cloned dinosaurs to survive, or perhaps they could adapt to our current conditions, who can say?
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#38The dinosaurs lived in an incomprehensibly different world. From the food and nutrition to the very air they were breathing which we only have vague ideas about. That means the first several generations at the very least would suffer and die from various nutrition, toxicity and environment issues. Even after all that got figured out the dinosaurs would likely have be confined to some small controlled environment righ…
As far as I understand, keeping such creatures alive would require facilities with enriched oxygen. If the large ones escaped, they would suffocate.
"...large dinosaurs really required to be living in an oxygen tent. An atmosphere in the neighborhood of 35 percent oxygen would be considerably more compatible with large dinosaurs than one in the neighborhood of 28."
Volcanic activity in the Cretaceous enabled these high oxygen levels.
"The Cretaceous is clearly a green house period as opposed to the present ice house that we have... One of the problems that people have always suggested about these high levels of oxygen at various times in the past, is that this is comparable to what you have in an oxygen tent in a hospital. And what about wildfires? What they forget is that the reason for this high oxygen is that there is also a high carbon dioxide level. We are talking about carbon dioxide levels 6 to 10 times the present carbon dioxide level. And that is more than enough to essentially combat wildfires."
https://profjoecain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/robert-e-...
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#39As others on this thread pointed out, faithfully replicating a dinosaur is both difficult, due to lack of data and a bit pointless if it could be accomplished.
Synthetic biology has bigger fish to fry. For example we are very likely to find that humans are really bad at living in space or on other planets. Fixing that problem has more practical implications.
Re: What would it take to bring back the dinosaurs?
#40The dinosaurs lived in an incomprehensibly different world. From the food and nutrition to the very air they were breathing which we only have vague ideas about. That means the first several generations at the very least would suffer and die from various nutrition, toxicity and environment issues. Even after all that got figured out the dinosaurs would likely have be confined to some small controlled environment righ…
Life.. uh.. finds a way
Google searches for "high altitude dinosaur" mostly find complaints that scientists assume they exist but mountains are peak erosion sites so there are no fossils or other evidence.
Theoretically geologists could predict high altitude plains or areas of generally high ground, probably, and it would be interesting to see reported fossils in those known lower PP-O2 areas. Fossilized vegetation evidence in the area of dino fossils could indicate higher altitude for both.
Sure, intuitively most dinos would thrive in hot swampy jungles. But there's so much delicious higher altitude land covered in pine trees waiting to be eaten... The cold argument is serious, but plenty of animals migrate, so given great forest of edible food, something should have evolved to eat its way uphill in the summer ...