• Question: Would we ever be able to bring animals back from extinction, like in Jurassic park?

    Asked by 263mcsb33 to Alex, Anaïs, Peter, Sarwat, Shreesha on 10 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by LilyMarie.
    • Photo: Peter Maskell

      Peter Maskell answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      If we had a complete set of the DNA of an animal then possibly. Unfortunately no one has found dinosaur DNA in insects in amber.

    • Photo: Shreesha Bhat

      Shreesha Bhat answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      Like Peter said, Its very unlikely unless we have a whole set of DNA of the particular animal. Even a single substitution in the base pair of the DNA could make the experiment a failure.

    • Photo: Anaïs Pujol

      Anaïs Pujol answered on 11 Mar 2015:

      First in jurassic park the mosquitoes are trapped in amber, however, even DNA preserved in amber degrades over several million years. Then even if you succeed to find DNA in a mosquito, during the extraction it might be mixed with the mosquito’s DNA, so not pure. Then if you succeed to get the DNA of an entire dinosaur, you will still have to create them by getting chromosomes and to put this chromosomes somewhere…so not that easy !!!

    • Photo: Sarwat Iqbal

      Sarwat Iqbal answered on 12 Mar 2015:

      very unlikely

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