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I heard from my science teacher that if scientists find the blood sample of a dinosaur they can bring dinosaurs back to life, is this true? Zhina, Ottawa, Canada
Tap, tap, tap... The ostrich heard her young pecking to escape its shell. She adjusted her soft, feathery wings over the clutch, protecting her eggs from the blistering African sun. Her long neck held her head at ground-level, just above the drab spread wings. Mother and clutch — almost undetectable. Eventually, the labouring "chick" pecked a circular crack around the blunt end, opened the egg and climbed out. He lay panting while his surrogate mother lifted a wing slightly, and peered in. A dinosaur!
Is this a scenario from a science fiction movie, or a real possibility?
Your teacher said if we can find a dino blood sample. How do we find a fresh sample? We need near-perfect DNA for cloning to work, says biologist Theresa Mecklenborg, but the last dinosaur died about 65 million years ago. A sample from an animal dead for more five days is useless for cloning.
Well, how about a fresh-frozen sample, assuming we found a dinosaur that froze immediately after death? But dinosaurs lived in warm lands where nothing froze. Already, we've hit a snag so great that cloning success is not possible.
Your teacher set up a big if. But, even if we could find a fresh sample, could we bring dinosaurs back to life? Again, extremely unlikely. We must clone both males and females to create a viable breeding population.
And at present, our successful-cloning rate is dismal. Two hundred and seventy seven cloned sheep died before Dolly the sheep managed to survive. We tried to clone a rare Asian wild cattle, the gaur, but weren't very successful. Bessie the cow did accept the gaur DNA, and gave birth to a gaur calf. But the calf died a few days later.
So, your teacher is perhaps theoretically correct. But we cannot bring dinosaurs back by cloning, at least at our present level of technology.
Further Reading:
- Cloning, ExtinctAnimal.com
- Cloning extinct animals
(Answered Sep. 8, 2008)
April Holladay lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her column, WonderQuest, appears every second Monday of the month on globetechnology.com. To read April's past columns, please visit her website. If you have a question for April, visit this information page.
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