Is it possible to clone dinosaurs? Resurrection of dinosaurs Cloning of dinosaurs is real
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Cloning animals is becoming commonplace. Gradually, scientists are taking up extinct species and dream of bringing the mammoth and Neanderthal back to life. But what about dinosaurs?
The film “Jurassic Park” revolutionized the world of science: international projects appeared to study the remains and DNA of ancient lizards, and the number of paleontologists increased 4 times. Everyone was motivated by interest and the desire to give a definitive answer to the question of whether it is possible to clone those who lived on Earth 60 million years before the appearance of man.
Since the early 2000s, scientists' opinions have varied. Skeptics said goodbye to their childhood dream: even if they possess such technology, people are unlikely to use it to recreate a dinosaur that has no place in the modern world. But there are those who think differently.
website briefly explains how scientists hope to revive ancient fossils in the near future and what results can be talked about today. Dedicated to everyone who dreamed of seeing a live tyrannosaurus - do not despair, there is still hope.
2. We are looking for unknown forms of life on our planet in order to study the mechanisms and functions of genes, create new species and resurrect old ones
Since a paleontologist at the University of North Carolina Mary Schweitzer(Mary Schweitzer) discovered them in dinosaur fossils soft fabric and, before modern science about ancient creatures, the question arose: will we ever be able to find authentic dinosaur DNA?
And if so, won’t we be able to use it to recreate these amazing animals?
It's not easy to give clear answers to these questions, but Dr. Schweizer agreed to help us understand what we know about dinosaur genetic material today and what we can expect in the future.
Can we get DNA from fossils?
This question should be understood as "can we get dinosaur DNA"? Bones are composed of the mineral hydroxyapatite, which has such a high affinity for DNA and many proteins that it is widely used today in laboratories to purify their molecules. Dinosaur bones have lain in the ground for 65 million years, and the likelihood is quite high that if you start actively looking for DNA molecules in them, you may well be able to find them.
Simply because some biomolecules can stick to this mineral like Velcro. The problem, however, will be not so much simply finding DNA in dinosaur bones, but rather proving that these molecules belong specifically to dinosaurs and did not come from some other possible sources.
Will we ever be able to recover genuine DNA from a dinosaur bone? The scientific answer is yes. Anything is possible until proven otherwise. Can we now prove the impossibility of extracting dinosaur DNA? No, we can't. Do we already have a genuine molecule with dinosaur genes? No, this question remains open for now.
How long can DNA remain in the geological record and how can one prove that it belongs specifically to a dinosaur and did not end up in a sample in the laboratory along with some contaminant?
Many scientists believe that DNA has a fairly short shelf life. In their opinion, these molecules are unlikely to survive longer than a million years, and certainly no more than five to six million years in the best case. This position deprives us of hope of seeing the DNA of creatures that lived over 65 million years ago. But where did these numbers come from?
Scientists working on this problem placed DNA molecules in hot acid and timed the time it took for them to break down. High temperatures and acidity were used as "substitutes" for long periods of time. According to the researchers' findings, DNA decays quite quickly.
The results of one such study, which compared the number of DNA molecules successfully extracted from samples of different ages - from several hundred to 8,000 years old - showed that the number of extracted molecules decreases with age.
Scientists were even able to model "decay rates" and predicted, although they did not test this claim, that detecting DNA in Cretaceous bone was extremely unlikely. Oddly enough, the same study showed that age alone cannot explain the decay or preservation of DNA.
On the other hand, we have four independent lines of evidence that molecules chemically similar to DNA can be localized in the cells of our own bones, and this fits well with what we would expect to find in dinosaur bones.
So if we extract DNA from dinosaur bones, how can we be sure it's not the result of later contamination?
The idea that DNA could last that long really has a pretty slim chance of success, so any claim to find or recover real dinosaur DNA must meet the most stringent criteria.
We offer the following:
1. The DNA sequence isolated from the bone should match what would be expected based on other data. Today, more than 300 features are known that link dinosaurs to birds, providing convincing evidence that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs.
Therefore, dinosaur DNA sequences obtained from their bones should be more similar to the genetic material of birds than to the DNA of crocodiles, while being different from both. They will also be different from any DNA coming from modern sources.
2. If dinosaur DNA were real, it would obviously be highly fragmented and difficult to analyze with our current methods designed to sequence healthy, happy modern DNA.
If "T. Rex DNA" turns out to consist of long chains that are relatively easy to decipher, then most likely we are dealing with contamination and not genuine dinosaur DNA.
3. The DNA molecule is considered more fragile compared to other chemical compounds. Therefore, if authentic DNA is present in the material, then there must also be other, more durable molecules, for example, collagen.
At the same time, the connection with birds and crocodiles should also be traced in the molecules of these more stable compounds. In addition, fossil material may contain, for example, lipids that make up cell membranes. Lipids are more stable on average than proteins or the same DNA molecules.
4. If proteins and DNA have been successfully preserved since Mesozoic times, their connection to dinosaurs must be confirmed not only by sequencing, but also by other methods of scientific research. For example, binding proteins to specific antibodies will prove that they are indeed soft tissue proteins and not contamination from external rocks.
In our studies, we were able to successfully localize a substance chemically similar to DNA within T. rex bone cells using both DNA-specific methods and antibodies to proteins associated with vertebrate DNA.
5. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, appropriate controls should be applied to all phases of any study. Along with the samples from which we hope to extract DNA, the host rocks must also be examined, as well as all the chemical compounds used in the laboratory. If they also contain sequences that are of interest to us, then most likely they are simply contaminants.
So will we ever be able to clone a dinosaur?
In a way. Cloning, as usually done in the laboratory, involves inserting a known piece of DNA into bacterial plasmids.
This fragment is replicated whenever a cell divides, resulting in many copies of identical DNA.
University of North Carolina paleontologist Mary Schweitzer
Another cloning method involves placing an entire set of DNA into viable cells from which their own nuclear material has been previously removed. Then such a cell is placed in the host’s body, and the donor DNA begins to control the formation and development of offspring completely identical to the donor.
The famous Dolly the sheep is an example of the use of just this cloning method. When people talk about "cloning a dinosaur" they usually mean something like this. However, this process is incredibly complex, and despite the unscientific nature of such an assumption, the likelihood that we will ever be able to overcome all the inconsistencies between DNA fragments from dinosaur bones and produce viable offspring is so small that I classify it as a "non-starter". seems possible."
But just because the likelihood of creating a real Jurassic Park is slim, one cannot say that it is impossible to recover the original dinosaur DNA itself or other molecules from ancient remains. In fact, these ancient molecules could tell us a lot. After all, all evolutionary changes must first occur in genes and be reflected in DNA molecules.
We can also learn a lot about the longevity of molecules in natural conditions directly, rather than through laboratory experiments. Finally, recovering molecules from fossil specimens, including dinosaurs, gives us important information about the origins and spread of various evolutionary innovations, such as feathers.
We still have a lot to learn about the molecular analysis of fossils, and we must proceed with extreme caution, never overestimating the data we obtain. But there are so many interesting things we can extract from molecules preserved in fossils that it is certainly worth our effort.
The dream of reviving dinosaurs, mammoths and other extinct animals constantly pops up in the press, although the vast majority of scientists are very skeptical about this idea. Will people ever be able to walk in the park for any period of time?
Alexander Chubenko
Let's start with the bad news: Jurassic Park is pure fantasy. There were not even traces of DNA left in mosquitoes immured in amber, much less in the fossilized remains of dinosaurs. Most likely, even before the start of filming the first film of the epic, her scientific consultant, paleontologist Jack Horner, had no doubt about this. Although (probably not without the influence of working with Spielberg) he developed a project to create a creature similar to a dinosaur, but more on that later.
And recently the dream of dinosaurs was finally put to rest. Danish and Australian paleogeneticists analyzed DNA from the bones of more than one and a half hundred extinct New Zealand giant moa birds aged from 600 to 8000 years and calculated that (in any case, when the bones were stored in the ground, and then in museums) the half-life of DNA is 521 years . The conclusion is clear: even in permafrost, after one and a half million years, the strands of fossil DNA will become too short to obtain information about the sequences of its nucleotides. The remains of the last dinosaur are 40 times older - dreamers can relax and dream about something more mundane. For example, about mammoths.
Mammoths: two approaches to the dream
Japanese geneticist Akira Iritani, one of the leaders of the Mammoth Creation Society, in the mid-1990s still hoped to find a viable egg and sperm in the carcasses of Siberian mammoths, and implant the result of their fusion into the uterus of an elephant. Realizing the unreality of such a hope, this strong old man (now just over 80) did not give up trying to obtain at least the nucleus of a somatic (preferably stem) cell in order to get a baby mammoth using the classic “Dolly method” - transferring this nucleus into an elephant egg.
It looks like this gun won't fire for ten (or maybe fifty) reasons. Firstly, the probability of finding a cell with intact chromosomes in tissues that have lain for 10,000 years in permafrost is virtually zero: they will be destroyed by ice crystals, residual enzyme activity, cosmic rays... We will analyze some of the other reasons using the example of another, less unrealistic idea.
Simplified family tree of the elephant family
An international group of scientists read almost the entire mammoth genome back in 2008. Its chromosomes can be assembled “brick by brick” - synthesizing chains of nucleotides, and not even all six-plus billion, but several thousand pairs of genes (out of about 20,000), which differ from similar sections of DNA from the closest surviving relative of mammoths - the Asian elephant. All that remains is to read the genome of this elephant, compare it with the genome of a mammoth, obtain a culture of elephant embryonic cells, replace the necessary genes in their chromosomes - and forward, along the road blazed by Ian Wilmut, leading Dolly the sheep on a string.
Since then, many different animals, from fish to monkeys, have been tilted. True, cells were taken from donors while they were alive and, if necessary, stored in liquid nitrogen, and less than 1% of the eggs with a transplanted nucleus are viable newborns. And if genes were changed, it was only one or two, not thousands. And they transplanted eggs into animals of the same species or very closely related ones, and Indian elephants and mammoths are about the same “relatives” as humans and chimpanzees.
Will a female elephant be able to accept a mammoth embryo, carry it for two years and give birth to a living and healthy baby? Very doubtful. And what will you do with one single baby mammoth? To maintain a population, even in a “Pleistocene period park,” a herd of at least a hundred animals is needed.
And it is highly desirable that they are not siblings, otherwise the likelihood of hereditary diseases in their offspring is too high - and the last mammoths became extinct, partly because they could not adapt to the next warming due to too little variability in their genomes. And so on. But if one day it is possible to clone mammoths, in the north of Yakutia a table and a home have long been prepared for them.
Pleistocene Park
Several tens of thousands of years ago, on the site of the current tundra, in the same climatic conditions as in our time, a tundra-steppe similar to the savannah grew, in which there were about the same number of bison, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions and other living creatures as there are now elephants, rhinoceroses, antelopes, lions and other animals in African reserves. The short northern summer was enough for plants to accumulate enough biomass both for themselves and to feed herbivores during the polar night.
But during the last large-scale warming, about 10,000 years ago, the animals of the mammoth steppe became extinct (perhaps primitive hunters accelerated this process a little). Without manure, the plants withered, the ecosystem went into disarray, and after another few thousand years the tundra became sightless and almost empty.
But in 1980, in a reserve near the city of Chersky at the mouth of the Kolyma, a group of enthusiasts led by the head of the North-Eastern Scientific Station of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Zimov, began work on recreating the ecosystem of the mammoth steppe by introducing into the tundra surviving Pleistocene animals or their modern analogues capable of existing in arctic climate.
They started with a fenced area of 50 hectares and a small herd of Yakut horses, which soon plucked and trampled almost all the vegetation in this “kraal” that was too small for them. But that was only the beginning. Now (for now - on a slightly larger area, 160 hectares) moose, reindeer, musk oxen, deer and bison have already been added to the horses.
Modest achievements
The last of the Tasmanian marsupial wolves, the thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), exterminated by dingoes, natives and, finally, European sheep farmers, died in the zoo in 1936. In 2008, researchers from the University of Melbourne isolated one of the regulatory genes that enhances the protein synthesis of another gene, which is responsible for the development of cartilage and bones, from preserved tissues of museum thylacine specimens, and replaced them with a similar regulatory gene in mouse eggs. In two-week-old mouse embryos (potential malformations were not allowed to be born), it was not the mouse protein that was synthesized, but the thylacine protein Col2A1. But you shouldn’t even dream about reviving the marsupial wolf on a mouse basis - this is just a genetic trick, the results of which may someday be useful, for example, for studying the functions of the genes of extinct species.
In the same Australia, this spring, bioengineers from the University of New South Wales tried to raise the frog Rheobatrachus silus, which became extinct just 30 years ago - a small animal curious because its females carried eggs in their mouths. Scientists introduced nuclei from frozen tissues of R. silus into the eggs of the frog species closest to it, Mixophyes fasciolatus, and even waited for several divisions of the eggs, after which the embryos died. But the trouble has begun, although for the public this amphibian little thing is not at all like dinosaurs.
The experiment of researchers from the University of Zaragoza to clone the Pyrenean mountain goat ended in failure, although much less so, the last representative of which died in 2000. The first two attempts to achieve the birth of goat kids from embryos obtained from cell nuclei frozen during the life of the last individual, and eggs from a domestic goat, ended in miscarriages at best. The third time (in 2009), Spanish scientists created 439 chimeric embryos, 57 of which began to divide and were implanted into the uteruses of surrogate mothers. Unfortunately, out of seven pregnant goats, only one survived to give birth, and the kid died a few minutes after birth due to breathing problems.
True, bison are inhabitants of deciduous forests, and if they fail to adapt to the Arctic, they are planning to replace them with a more suitable species - forest bison. We just need to wait until their small herd, sent by colleagues from the reserves of northern Canada and sent to stay at a nursery in the south of Yakutia, grows.
When (and if) instead of a large park, the project receives an area sufficient to organize a reserve, it will be possible to release wolves and bears from their enclosures and even try to introduce Amur tigers - the most suitable replacement for cave lions. Well, what about mammoths? And then the mammoths. If possible.
Are you flying, pigeons?
The project to revive the American passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) has nothing to do with ecology. On the contrary, even at the beginning of the 19th century in the east of North America, passenger pigeons flew in flocks of hundreds of millions of birds, devouring forests like locusts, leaving behind an inch layer of droppings, establishing colonies of hundreds of nests in trees and, despite all the efforts of predators, Indians, and then the first white settlers, did not decrease in number.
But with the advent of railroads, passenger pigeon hunting became a profitable business. Shoot without looking at a cloud flying over the farm or collect chicks like apples and hand them over to the buyer - a bunch for a penny, but as many bunches as you can carry. In just a quarter of a century, only a few thousand remained of the billions of passenger pigeons - too few to restore the population of these collectivists, even if it had occurred to someone at that time. The last passenger pigeon died at the zoo in 1914.
A young American geneticist, Ben Novak, was inspired by the dream of reviving the passenger pigeon. He even managed to get funding for his idea from the Revive and Restore Foundation, one of the branches of the Long Now organization founded by the writer Stuart Brand, which supports extravagant, but not too crazy projects in various fields of science.
Ben plans to use eggs from the band-tailed pigeon, a species most closely related to the passenger pigeon, as material for gene rearrangement. True, they are separated from their common ancestor by 30 million years and by a much greater number of mutations than between mammoths and elephants. And the experiment with replacing genes in bird embryos has more or less been worked out only on chickens, and no one has dealt with pigeons yet...
But the passenger pigeon genome had already been read from a tissue sample provided by a museum, and in March 2013, Nowak began work on reconstructing the extinct bird at the University of California, Santa Cruz. True, even if the project ends in success, its results will live in zoos: in nature, passenger pigeons can only exist as part of multimillion-dollar flocks. What awaits the US Corn Belt if these flocks are able to adapt to new living conditions?
Although, even if it is not possible to recreate passenger pigeons, the results obtained will be useful for attempts to revive dodos (funny Dodo birds), New Zealand moas, similar Madagascar apiornis and other recently extinct bird species.
In January 2013, incredible news spread around the world media: the famous geneticist George Church from Harvard University was looking for a brave woman to serve as a surrogate mother for cloning a Neanderthal. A day later, all the decent publications that took the bait published a refutation: it turned out that journalists from the Daily Mail made a slight mistake when translating an interview in the German weekly Spiegel. Church, who had never studied the Neanderthal genome, only argued that it would theoretically be possible to clone him someday, but is it necessary?
Kurosaurs: forward to the past!
Now let's return to the scientist we started with: Jack Horner of Montana State University, author of How to Build a Dinosaur. True, it will be more likely a chickenosaurus: the project is called Chickenosaurus, and, according to the author, its implementation will take only five years. To do this, you need to “wake up” the preserved but inactive dinosaur genes in the chicken embryo. We can start with the teeth: Archeopteryx and other early birds had quite good teeth. True, the maximum that researchers working in this area have been able to achieve is 16-day-old chicken embryos with several conical teeth in the front of the beak, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step...
This is exactly how Horner plans to raise his Kurosaurus in several stages - step by step, gene by gene, protein by protein. Remove the fourth toe, turn the wings into paws... And the first stage of the project will require five to seven years of work and a couple of million dollars. However, there is no information yet that the Kurosaurs project has received funding. But there will certainly be a patron of the arts: it doesn’t really matter that these won’t be exactly real dinosaurs and, to begin with, will be the size of a chicken. But it's beautiful.
Speaking of beauty, the dark coloring and scales of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park make them look scarier, but it's probably not true. Both Horner and many other paleontologists have long held the view that most, if not all, land dinosaurs were warm-blooded and covered in colorful feathers. Including the Terrible Royal Lizard - Tyrannosaurus rex. Warm-bloodedness is still a controversial issue, but undoubted traces of feathers on the fossilized remains of close relatives of the tyrannosaurus - Yutyrannus huali (translated from Latin-Chinese - “Beautiful tyrant in feathers”, weight - almost 1.5 tons, length - 9 m) - were recently discovered expedition of Chinese paleontologists. And so what if the structure of its primitive feathers, up to 15 cm long, is more similar to chicken down, and not to the complex feathers of modern birds? Well, it can’t be that they weren’t beautifully painted!
And if future mammoths, dodos, dinosaurs and other extinct animals are not entirely real, but almost identical to natural ones, who among you will refuse to walk through a park of a period that, at first glance, is indistinguishable from the Jurassic or Pleistocene?
One of our readers commented with the question: “When will geneticists resurrect dinosaurs?” With the release of Jurassic World, as well as after numerous news about the successes of some groups of scientists, we decided to take on this topic and tell you news from the world of science regarding the resurrection of something that has long been dead. Let’s say in advance that we tried to voice mostly positive news.
So, resurrecting extinct species sounds a little sinister. Indeed, you immediately remember old horror films, where some crazy professor resurrects the dead through electrical influence and the infusion of some strange green liquids, and then a creepy laugh is heard and the monster gets out of control. , not otherwise.
But in reality, everything doesn’t look so creepy, and the goals pursued are quite noble. Extinct species can tell us a lot about the past of our planet, in addition, their recreation will once again prove that people can cope with completely different, at first glance, unresolved problems.
But it’s clear that everything can’t be done at once. And many scientists who speak positively about the possibility of resurrecting a dinosaur are first going to take on a task of a smaller scale, but, however, also from the realm of science fiction. This task is the resurrection of the mammoth. And now the search for its solution has been in full swing since the spring of this year. You can even observe a kind of race between different scientific groups that have taken up the task of resurrecting the disappeared animal.
Let us remember that mammoths became extinct about 10 thousand years ago, and appeared in the Pliocene era. Their height could reach 5.5 meters, and their weight could be about 12 tons. Based on mass, the mammoth was approximately twice as large as modern elephants in this parameter.
One of the groups is the George Church Research Group at Harvard. Church is a proponent of completely deciphering the mammoth genome in order to recreate the extinct species of elephants. Others believe it is possible to clone mammoths using remains found in permafrost.
We worked primarily with genes responsible for the survival of the body in low temperatures: genes for coat, large ears, subcutaneous fat and, above all, hemoglobin. Now we have healthy elephant cells with fragments of mammoth DNA at our disposal. We have not yet presented the results of this experiment in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but plan to do so soon.
George Church
Mammoths, according to the geneticist, will be able to stabilize the ecosystem of the Siberian tundra. A very noble task, and we hope it will become feasible in the near future. And hopes in this regard are quite justified.
Just recently, another research group led by Dr. Vincent Lynch, University of Chicago, completed the first phase of studying the mammoth genome. The resulting genes amazed scientists with their characteristics. For example, the TRPV3 gene helped animals live in permafrost conditions. Geneticists introduced this gene into the genome of laboratory rats, whose bodies were soon overgrown with fur. As a result, the rats preferred to live in the coolest areas of the enclosure.
At least three teams are currently working on reconstructing the mammoth genome, and if the experiments are successful, then in the future it will be possible to reconstruct other creatures, mainly from DNA found in fossilized remains.
It is worth noting that although such work is being carried out in a dynamic mode, we are unlikely to see its fruits next year.
Well, now a little realism. Will we see real dinosaurs in our lifetime? Most likely no. For objective reasons. Even with such major breakthroughs in genetics, we are unlikely to be able to find good enough genetic material from extinct reptiles.
Although there is an optimistic forecast from the American paleontologist Jack Horner, he is also the chief scientific consultant of the film “Jurassic Park”. He is famous for his attempts to recreate dinosaurs and has also been successful in finding fossils containing blood vessels and soft tissue. But he, like many others, has not yet been able to find complete DNA. Therefore, Jack decided to take a different path, namely the rollback of evolution. With the help of genetic engineering, a scientist is going to return an ordinary chicken to the state of its distant ancestors. Horner believes that his project will be successful, and humanity is only a few years away from the return of dinosaurs.
I think we can achieve a set of genetic changes in a single embryo that will result in the animal successfully hatching and living a normal life, moving and functioning without problems. I will be very surprised if we don't do this within 10 years. And if we're lucky, we'll get it within the next five years, spending no more than five million dollars on the whole process.
Jack Horner
Horner's idea was picked up by other biologists. For example, a research team led by Arhat Abzhanov of Harvard and Bhart-Anjan Bhullar of Chicago were able to produce chicken embryos with dinosaur faces by suppressing the development of the proteins that make beaks. Digital models of the skulls showed that the bones in many of them were similar to those of early birds (Archaeopteryx) and dinosaurs (such as Velociraptor).
Judge for yourself, we have already been able to create bird embryos with teeth and changed the structure of the head. Now we are working on the tail and paws. Therefore, I am confident that with the help of genetic engineering we will be able to create Kurosaurus in the next five to ten years. After all, birds are dinosaurs that have stopped developing.
Jack Horner
In any case, it seems to us that there are prospects in this direction. There is a big problem in recreating the genome of dinosaurs that went extinct millions of years ago, but perhaps the research really will go the other way - by rolling back evolution. What can come of this? Who knows, maybe nothing. But maybe we are still destined to see some small bastard from antiquity who will amaze us with its strangeness and dissimilarity to everything we have seen so far.
In June it was released on big screens, raising a new round of questions among curious viewers about its scientific credibility. Is it possible to resurrect dinosaurs using the method described by science fiction writers?
This question was answered in a column for The Conversation answered Darren Griffin, professor of genetics at the University of Kent.
How dinosaurs were cloned in Jurassic Park
“First, the idea that intact dinosaur DNA would be preserved inside blood-sucking insects frozen in amber is simply incongruous,” Griffin writes. — Prehistoric mosquitoes that drank the blood of dinosaurs have actually been found. But the DNA contained in this blood has long since degraded.
Unlike Neanderthals and woolly mammoths, whose DNA has been successfully isolated, dinosaurs are too ancient. The oldest DNA ever discovered is only about a million years old. But to get dinosaur DNA, we'd have to go back at least 66 million years.
Second, even if we could extract dinosaur DNA, it would be chopped up into millions of tiny particles, and we would have no idea how to organize them. It would be like trying to put together the most complex puzzle in the world without knowing what the original image looks like or how many pieces it should contain.
In Jurassic Park, scientists find these missing fragments and fill them in with frog DNA. But that won't give you a dinosaur. This will produce a hybrid or "frogsaurus". It would also make more sense to use bird DNA since they are more closely related to dinosaurs (though that still wouldn't work).
Third, the idea that all it takes to restore an animal is a twist of DNA—science fiction. DNA is the starting point, but the development of the animal inside the egg is a complex "dance" of genes coming on and off at the right time.
In short, you need the perfect dinosaur egg and all the complex chemistry it contains. In the book, scientists produce artificial eggs; in the films, they use ostrich eggs. None of these methods will work. You can't put chicken DNA inside an ostrich egg and get a chicken (and people have tried). The same can be said about Velociraptor."
The geneticist crushes the dreams of naive fans of the science fiction franchise, but emphasizes that in the future such technology can be used to compensate for some of the harm caused to animals by people.
“Humanity has seen the disappearance of birds - the dodo and the passenger pigeon. Recovering their DNA, which is only a few hundred years old, is a much more realistic proposal. It's also possible that the eggs of living genetically related species will provide a good enough environment that we use them to resurrect extinct animals."