The most immediate obstacle to recreating dinosaurs is getting any sort of meaningful genome. For more recently extinct animals such as mammoths this isn't as much of as a problem, as there are reasonably well-preserved specimens available. That's not really the case with dinosaurs as they've been dead for millions of years, which is enough to severely degrade any DNA.
Mammoths are also quite recent so theoretically you could reconstruct what their genome looked like, by comparing genetic mutations in closely related organisms, and effectively backtracing. The further back you go the harder this gets, as you get mutations on top of mutations. You can attempt to go back even further using probability estimates based on how DNA is known to mutate, but after a certain point you're effectively engaging in guesswork.
Not to mention the logistical hurdles of getting funding, ethical approval, and suitable surrogates. Bringing back dinosaurs isn't impossible, but it's pretty damn hard and they would never be exactly the same.
Bringing back recently extinct animals however is a different game, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see it in our lifetimes. There are several projects which collect the DNA of near-extinct or extinct animals with the hope of resurrecting them in the near-future.
[–]ShinyVoater0 points
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Not to mention the logistical hurdles of getting funding, ethical approval, and suitable surrogates. Bringing back dinosaurs isn't impossible, but it's pretty damn hard and they would never be exactly the same.
The original book largely addressed this, though ethical issues weren't brought up past Hammond choosing theme parks as a moneymaker because nobody needs them: first they had to import a metric crapload of amber to get any sort of genomes at all and even then they were plugging the holes with anything and everything that looked like the genes might fit(the geneticist had to look to see they'd used DNA from the infamous frogs, rather than them being the sole source). Even then what they got wasn't what they wanted(admittedly, it's mostly implied that it's because paleontologists got it wrong), so they kept tweaking.
Which is almost exactly how reality would go down if we managed to pull it off - though hopefully without having them ruin two parks on us(do they ever address any of that in Jurassic World or do they just forget everything starting just after the pterodactyls flew off into the sunset?).
[–] VoatSimulator ago
The most immediate obstacle to recreating dinosaurs is getting any sort of meaningful genome. For more recently extinct animals such as mammoths this isn't as much of as a problem, as there are reasonably well-preserved specimens available. That's not really the case with dinosaurs as they've been dead for millions of years, which is enough to severely degrade any DNA.
Mammoths are also quite recent so theoretically you could reconstruct what their genome looked like, by comparing genetic mutations in closely related organisms, and effectively backtracing. The further back you go the harder this gets, as you get mutations on top of mutations. You can attempt to go back even further using probability estimates based on how DNA is known to mutate, but after a certain point you're effectively engaging in guesswork.
Not to mention the logistical hurdles of getting funding, ethical approval, and suitable surrogates. Bringing back dinosaurs isn't impossible, but it's pretty damn hard and they would never be exactly the same.
Bringing back recently extinct animals however is a different game, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see it in our lifetimes. There are several projects which collect the DNA of near-extinct or extinct animals with the hope of resurrecting them in the near-future.
[–] ShinyVoater ago (edited ago)
The original book largely addressed this, though ethical issues weren't brought up past Hammond choosing theme parks as a moneymaker because nobody needs them: first they had to import a metric crapload of amber to get any sort of genomes at all and even then they were plugging the holes with anything and everything that looked like the genes might fit(the geneticist had to look to see they'd used DNA from the infamous frogs, rather than them being the sole source). Even then what they got wasn't what they wanted(admittedly, it's mostly implied that it's because paleontologists got it wrong), so they kept tweaking.
Which is almost exactly how reality would go down if we managed to pull it off - though hopefully without having them ruin two parks on us(do they ever address any of that in Jurassic World or do they just forget everything starting just after the pterodactyls flew off into the sunset?).