REVERSE
EVOLUTION
SECOND COMING
The most common dinosaurs of today's world might just
be what scientists needed to bring back extinct dinosaurs.
he mighty mammoth
might be just on its
way to make a comeback, as the advancement of technology has given humans enough data to almost fully sequence the genome of mammoths through a mammoth carcass. Similar studies are being made in order to sequence the full genome of the Neanderthals.
If you think about it for a moment, we already have millions of dinosaurs around us, and we encounter them every day on our plates, on our streets, on our lakes and on our skies: birds! But if we were to be interested in classic non-avian dinosaurs can they be brought back?
Finding soft dinosaur tissue is almost impossible. Mammoths went extinct 10,000 years ago; and, on dinosaur timing that was like yesterday. Non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago and soft tissue doesn’t get fossilised for that long and even if it did, it would
contain no DNA as it has an estimated life of 6.5 million years before it breaks down.
So finding a fossilised mosquito in tree resin doesn’t work like in Jurassic Park, not that it’s even scientifically accurate to begin with.
work like in Jurassic Park, not that it’s even scientifically accurate to begin with.
Something really mind-blowing happened recently that scientists thought would never happen, as dinosaur soft tissue has been found inside of a thigh bone fossil in the bone marrow. That tissue contained no DNA but multiple proteins have been identified and many of them were proteins found in the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, Crocodiles and in avian dinosaurs.
Today, technology is not developed enough to be given data to sequence the full genome of species that went extinct millions of years ago. Recent discoveries and the current technology can offer only so much. It is not considered impossible to bring back a non-avian extinct dinosaur but it is very complicated and unlikely to happen anytime soon. Using epigenetics scientists have a shot at going back in evolution to reach the ancestors of birds but that remains also very complicated as there’s tons of nucleic acids, genes and proteins involved. Today, the focus is on chicken to be precise as chicken is a simple model bird that could be studied in developmental biology. Scientists look to identify the genes involved in the formation of the wings instead of dinosaur arms or the genes stopping the tail from developing. One of the major steps made in that field is growing reptilian teeth on chicken, a character that dinosaurs and crocodiles had but was lost with birds.
Today, it is not impossible but not likely that non-avian dinosaurs can be resurrected. But scientists will continue their work to increase our understanding of those unique species whether scaly or feathery.
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