Is it possible to do jurassic park

New fossils are being uncovered from the ground every day. However, while this can provide important evidence of a species' form, its organic material has long since disappeared.

Instead of bone, dinosaur fossils consist of rock and sediment that has filled the bone's place. While these clues can tell us about a specimen's shape and size, the time it was alive and any unique features the animal had, they are unable to give us the crucial genetic information.

In , researchers from the U. Many paleontologists are skeptical about this claim, as it is widely believed to be impossible for the protein in these molecules to survive for millions of years, according to an article published in The Conversation. The cartilage, from the Hypacrosaurus species of the Cretaceous Period , is over 70 million years old but has been calcified and fossilized, which may have protected the inside of the cells.

So, will it ever be possible to bring a dinosaur back from extinction? It's something that scientists are trying to work out, although the process would be quite different to how it's portrayed in the movies.

We can get collagen and some dinosaur proteins, but not all the material we need," paleontologist Jack Horner told How It Works magazine. The thing to do would be to grow it in a test tube, because we have no idea how big the embryos of all dinosaurs are.

Some dinosaur eggs are the size of ostrich eggs, but for a Tyrannosaur, we think they are a lot longer and they're bigger. It's like thinking about putting a human embryo inside a squirrel. Horner is the real paleontologist who inspired the character of Alan Grant in "Jurassic Park. He was also the palaeontology consultant for the "Jurassic Park" films.

And while he deems the cloning process pure fiction, it hasn't stopped Horner from trying to bring back the dinosaurs. The idea is to use atavistic genes. They are basically ancestral genes, meaning that ancestral animals programmed certain features.

For instance, occasionally children are born with extra vertebrae and form a low tail, which the doctor just picks off when the child is born. And every once in a while snakes are born with little appendages. Horner's plan is to take advantage of these atavistic genes. All bird species are related to one another, with one common ancestor — dinosaurs — so any bird should work. Chickens are the easiest thing to get eggs from, so I built a laboratory, hired some geneticists and developmental biologists and started seeing if we could find some of these potential atavistic genes," he said.

We are trying to figure out how the tail actually works and reverse the process that formed the short tail. Even if, somehow, the DNA hadn't entirely degraded and there was some bits of it left, you can't just fill those bits in with DNA from another organism like the frankenfrogosaurus implied by the film Jurassic Park. We would have no blueprint sequence available to determine what the missing bits should be filled with. Even though many modern day birds are similar to extinct dinosaurs that we might want to try to bring back indeed, birds are avian dinosaurs , you still can't make a hybrid dinobird using their DNA.

Unfortunately, biology doesn't work that way. It doesn't end there. Even if we did miraculously manage to find some usable dino DNA, we still wouldn't be able to do anything with it. The scientists apparently implanted the dino DNA into an ostrich womb? I can only assume they meant egg cell, as injecting DNA into the womb of an animal won't magically make an embryo. When cloning animals, scientists need to replace the genetic material from a donor cell of an animal that they are trying to clone.

We don't have any spare viable dinosaur cells hanging around. Scientists are hoping to be able to use elephant cells if they decide it is ethical to clone wooly mammoths, but even this requires some re-jigging of the normal cloning process since these two species diverged a long time ago. You couldn't replace DNA in a donor ostrich cell with, say, stegosaurus DNA to make a viable cell, they're too different. Apatosaurus's were also huge- the developing foetus would simply be too big for the ostrich.

Could Jurassic Park happen in real life? Back in , it seemed like it. Newsweek ran an article attesting to the scientific plausibility of Jurassic Park , pointing to the fact that — during filming — two Berkeley scientists announced that they had cloned 40m-year-old bee DNA after finding the insect preserved in amber. But there were problems even then. But none of the ancient DNA they harvested had more than Which is like unboxing a 10,piece T rex jigsaw to find two corner pieces and a bit of tooth.

The dinosaur DNA you need would have had to survive around 65m years. Perhaps life can find a way, though.