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.
It's possible, though unlikely, that some of the breakthroughs achieved during the dodo project could facilitate some dinosaur cloning down the line. But we wouldn't bet on it. If you want to see dinosaurs, your best bet is at the movies. Catch Jurassic Park, streaming now on Peacock.
Is it possible to clone a DNA from a fossil just like in the Jurassic Park movie? Short answer: No. (1) No dinosaur DNA is left. Dinosaurs have been gone for 70 million years.
The bonds that hold it together are weak and, over time, they break down. 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.
While birds are the closest living descendants of dinosaurs, crocodilians are their closest living relatives, highlighting the diverse and complex tree of life that connects modern species with their ancient ancestors.
Is Jurassic Park possible? Can YOU grow a Dinosaur? Science, DNA and Nerd-stuff explained!
Why can't we bring back dinosaurs?
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.
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.
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.
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 dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago, so definitely we don't have any DNA for dinosaurs at this point. We do, however, now have some blood, so we have some red blood cells that are preserved from dinosaurs and some other soft tissue features. So maybe in the future we might be able to get some DNA.
They noted that molecular evidence suggests mosquitoes arose during the Jurassic Period, which ran from about 200 million to 145 million years ago. There are more than 3,500 species of mosquitoes worldwide, found everywhere except Antarctica.
Though this seems to be an oversight, there's a simple explanation: nothing in Jurassic Park is really a dinosaur. As Dr. Grant pointed out in Jurassic Park III, dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, and what Dr. Wu and InGen did was create genetically engineered theme park monsters.
No, for the same reason we can't bring the non-avian dinosaurs back, à la Jurassic Park. To clone an animal, we'd most ideally have a living specimen. Scientists can clone sheep and cattle and other animals, because they are still around. Titanoboa died out tens of millions of years ago.
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.
Would humans exist if dinosaurs didn't go extinct?
“If we speculate that humans had evolved alongside dinosaurs, then they probably would have been able to co-exist,” says Farke. “Humans already evolved in ecosystems that had large land animals and predators. We probably would have done okay.”
The planet has experienced five previous mass extinction events, the last one occurring 65.5 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs from existence. Experts now believe we're in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.
A December 2022 study published in Science Advances states that "the planet has entered the sixth mass extinction" and warns that current anthropogenic trends, particularly regarding climate and land-use changes, could result in the loss of more than a tenth of plant and animal species by the end of the century.
“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.
Advances in genetic science and the Neanderthal Genome Project have made significant strides toward understanding Neanderthal physiology, but resurrecting a Neanderthal remains beyond current capabilities.
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.
The woolly mammoth was a big, shaggy species of elephant that roamed the tundra before going extinct thousands of years ago. Colossal has been working to bring the mammoth, the dodo bird and other extinct species back to life using the latest cloning and genetic engineering techniques.
