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The classic concept for dinosaur resurrection starts with the DNA-filled maggot, preserved for millions of years in amber. In the film, scientists can return dinosaurs via DNA found in the blood held in ancient mosquitoes trapped in amber for millions of years. Dinosaurs could come back, but they could only do so within a laboratory setting. Scientists may plausibly clone dinosaurs, but those dinosaurs would not be able to survive in the world at large because the environment is too different from what they had adapted to; it is too cool, and the plants are too small. The DNA of dinosaurs, which could have been held within blood-sucking insects trapped inside amber, is interesting because DNA contains the genetic information of growth and function in all living things. While dinosaur bones may have survived millions of years, dinosaur DNA almost certainly did not. Dinosaur DNA is way too old, as dinosaurs went extinct more than 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago; with so much time passing, it is doubtful any dinosaur DNA will still exist today. If the dinosaurs had not gone extinct, humans are not likely have been able to evolve. Dinosaurs Cannot Return. Sorry. That is, if conditions arising from the extinction of the dinosaurs were present today, no living animals would evolve to become dinosaurs again. That is because animals today have very different evolutionary pasts than dinosaurs. Evolution is the process that explains how each living creature, including humans, evolved over millions, or even billions, of years from previous creatures. Some have suggested that dinosaurs never went extinct but evolved into similar-looking animals today, like birds. The common pigeon is not something that most people would picture if asked to think about a dinosaur, but this lineage of birds-dinosaurs does suggest that traits that resemble the dinosaurs might be redesigned from birds. Researchers have reconstructed teeth, tails, and even hands similar to Tyrannosaurus rex by messing around with birds' genomes. Another intriguing innovation-based prediction is to clone living animals to reverse-engineer their DNA and recreate dinosaurs. It seems that the idea of cloning dinosaurs is not off the table, but the alternative to recreating an extinct animal is reverse-engineering it. Using genetic engineering to resurrect extinct animals could, in some circumstances, be considered plausible. Recreating dinosaurs or any other extinct animals could raise several ethical issues. Critics of the cloning of extinct species, dinosaurs or otherwise, say that large amounts of the money used in such studies would be better spent on conservation efforts. Ancient DNA Can Enable Cloning in Laboratory Conditions Ancient DNA samples occasionally spark questions about the potential of bringing extinct animals back to life with advances in cloning techniques. Old DNA cloning has captured the imagination of humans for years, including in the hit movie franchise Jurassic Park (based on Michael Crichton's book), where dinosaurs are brought back from extinction using similar techniques. In the 1990s, several discoveries claimed that DNA had been extracted from up to 120 million years ago, including an 80-million-year-old dinosaur bone. 1 Early anecdotal reports about retrieving DNA segments that were millions of years old from a dinosaur bone or insect entombments in amber proved unreplicable during more recent, widespread investigations. Some researchers cannot currently locate DNA in dinosaurs. Some researchers expect finding DNA will provide them with insights into the advancing species of today's Earth, like endangered ones or ones that resemble dinosaurs but are not related. Researchers holding to this belief say scientists must broaden their search beyond fossils to find any living creatures related to dinosaurs or whatever else they might be able to learn about. Some researchers think that one day, they might be able to find the DNA of dinosaurs. Scientists face a significant challenge when trying to locate DNA in dinosaur fossils. DNA cells decay over time, so finding DNA from dinosaurs might not be possible if the cells were not preserved in some way. That means for all scientists know, even using the best technologies available today, you cannot create a dinosaur from its DNA. Contemporary Studies on Dinosaur Soft Tissues While a newly announced discovery of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur tail, which includes bones, soft tissues, and feathers, all encased in amber, is exciting to scientists studying ancient animals, a broken DNA means that it will not be valid for their resurrection. We are still far from being able to recreate extinct creatures' DNA, and resurrecting the DNA of dinosaurs, or other long-extinct forms, might not even be possible. Scientists might someday discover blood or soft tissues within the fossils of those animals, which are about 70 million years old. Scientists analyzed multiple strands from the DNA of the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger, concluding that implanting the extinct DNA into the embryos of close living relatives can successfully resurrect extinct animals. The sample of mammoth genomic DNA, which is more than one million years old, was found in teeth from a mammoth preserved in the Permafrost in Eastern Siberia. Scientists found DNA fragments in neanderthal and other fossil mammals, like woolly mammoths. Scraps of prehistoric tissues, proteins, or DNA may revolutionize the field of molecular paleontology, unlocking many mysteries about dinosaur life. By editing genetic codes from the DNA of the closest living relatives of extinct animals, scientists can slowly work their way backward, manipulating the blueprint for the species' DNA. When the animal dies, the DNA remains in body parts, which scientists can extract and pull out using heat.1 These strands can then be split up and copied again - a genetic Xerox machine. We have DNA for living creatures, including ourselves, yet we cannot clone any living animals (from DNA alone). Most projects to reverse species loss are feasible because researchers have live cells, or entire genomes, of a species that has been lost, as well as a living relative who could serve as both genetic model and surrogate mother to resurrected animals. Different predictions of what could have happened if we brought dinosaurs back ranged from dinosaurs living side-by-side with humans and animals to them going extinct again.

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