Ultimately though, we need intact DNA to resurrect species. So, although scientists have made a lot of progress, the prospect remains in the realm of science fiction. All data from fossils and experiments to date suggests that DNA is simply unlikely to survive for tens of millions of years.
Scientists estimate that the final best by date for DNA is about a million years after an organism's death, and that's only under the exact right conditions. We're about 65 million years too late for retrieving viable dinosaur DNA.
The oldest DNA fragments recovered are only 800,000 years old, so dinosaur cloning is probably impossible. True cloning also requires an intact, living cell and it has only ever been successful using a host animal of the same species. That rules out mammoth cloning too.
Frozen DNA can only last about a million years, and non-avian dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago. However, there is a strikingly brilliant and brave way of obtaining their DNA. If scientists had the ability to bring back dinosaurs, would a real Jurassic Park be made? Of course not.
Many of them probably could survive today. Dinosaurs ruled the world for 150 million years, and endured hot and cold spells, volcanic eruptions, and changing sea levels. There is nothing about today's world that would be fatal to them.
Could Jurassic Park Happen In Real Life? | Unveiled
Could humans breathe in the Jurassic period?
Between 850 and 600 million years ago, oxygen concentrations increased steadily from 2 to about 10 per cent: still not enough for humans to survive on. Fast forward to 400 million years ago and you could just about breathe but might feel dizzy and confused on about 16 per cent oxygen.
“Humans already evolved in ecosystems that had large land animals and predators. We probably would have done okay.” “Unarmed, solitary humans are still easy targets for large predators like bears and lions,” agrees Arbour. “But overall humans are pretty good at surviving alongside large, dangerous animals.”
Ultimately though, we need intact DNA to resurrect species. So, although scientists have made a lot of progress, the prospect remains in the realm of science fiction. All data from fossils and experiments to date suggests that DNA is simply unlikely to survive for tens of millions of years.
A team has extracted what could be DNA molecules from a 125-million-year-old fossil dinosaur, according to a study published last month (September 24) in Communications Biology.
Dinosaurs are still with us, in the form of birds. But could the more canonical dinosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops and Stegosaurus, evolve again, if the climate and temperature switched back to what the conditions were like during the Cretaceous? Probably not.
Even with new collection technologies, under the best possible conditions, the limit of DNA survival is perhaps 1 million years. The last of the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, so Jurassic Park likely won't become a reality anytime soon.
The revival of the woolly mammoth is a proposed hypothetical that frozen soft-tissue remains and DNA from extinct woolly mammoths could be a means of regenerating the species. Several methods have been proposed to achieve this goal, including cloning, artificial insemination, and genome editing.
“There are a tonne of existing technical challenges that would need to be solved in order to bring a dodo back to life,” she told BBC Wildlife in 2022. “First, one needs to be able to figure out what genetic differences in the dodo genome make the dodo look and act like a dodo.
Maybe one of them is the Carcharocles megalodon. Are scientists trying to bring back a form of the Megalodon? No. Not only is that not really possible, given we have no Megalodon DNA to work with, but why would we do that?
The first one in Jurassic Park was the idea that we could maybe extract some blood from a mosquito and then take the DNA from that to fill in the gaps in “dino DNA”, and then clone a dinosaur. Well, we still can't do that 30 years on from the film, and that's because we haven't found any DNA from dinosaurs.
What makes the latest discovery so remarkable is that the blood cells and collagen were found in specimens that the researchers themselves describe as “crap”. If soft tissue can survive in these fossils, then museum collections of more impressive remains could harbour troves of soft dinosaur tissue.
The non-avian dinosaur part of the evolutionary tree went extinct about 66 million years ago, likely due to a catastrophic event such as an asteroid impact, leaving no real dinosaurs alive today except for their bird descendants.
At this point, this isn't possible. The sequencing of the human genome, for example, took 13 years to complete, and the final product wasn't something researchers could use to clone people. Reconstructing complete strands of dinosaur DNA would require technology far beyond what exists today.
Paleontologists and molecular biologists have searched for a couple of decades to find and replicate DNA from some non-avian dinosaur fossil. But to date, no results have been obtained, either from fossil bones or teeth preserved in sediments or from a fossil preserved in amber, as was done in the film, Jurassic Park.
This is why, even though we have an abundance of dinosaur fossils, we don't have any dinosaur DNA. The beasts died out 66 million years ago, and the DNA would simply not survive that long. When DNA degrades, the once-long strands of information break apart into smaller and smaller pieces.
We will likely live longer and become taller, as well as more lightly built. We'll probably be less aggressive and more agreeable, but have smaller brains. A bit like a golden retriever, we'll be friendly and jolly, but maybe not that interesting.
It is therefore entirely possible for prehistoric genetic material to survive for up to one million years. But the big dinosaurs departed this life some 66 million years ago. So the prospect of finding enough viable DNA material in what remains of them today is therefore vanishingly remote.
Alligators & Crocodiles: These sizeable reptiles survived—even though other large reptiles did not. Birds: Birds are the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Frogs & Salamanders: These seemingly delicate amphibians survived the extinction that wiped out larger animals.
