Can Dinosaurs Walk The Earth Again?

Since dinosaurs ruled the earth 65 million years ago, humanity has seen the footprint they have made on the world almost everywhere, ranging from their fossils to seeing them digitally brought back to life on the big screen.

The famous movie Jurassic Park brought these creatures to life in a theme park taken over by genetically engineered dinosaurs designed from their prehistoric DNA. Since its release in the early 90s featuring realistic animatronics that stunned moviegoers in theaters, the idea of ‘bringing back the extinct’ has been thrown in the air time and time again over the years.

So, is bringing back the extinct actually a possibility? And if so, is that something we should play with? When you consider the number of weighing factors like accessibility and the Half-Life of DNA, the probability tanks.

Can We Access And Use Prehistoric DNA?

The blockbuster movie, Jurassic Park, demonstrated scientists extracting prehistoric DNA from mosquitoes preserved in Amber. While we do have access to preserved Mosquitos that may, or may not, contain the blood of dinosaurs, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to extract it. Bone also poses as a viable option but again, getting access to it becomes exceedingly difficult when the specimen has been around for over 60 million years.

The DNA from bone would be crushed into a fine powder. It would then be sorted out from the mix of dirt, bone cells, and cells from bacteria or other microbes found.

Half-Life

Deoxyribonucleic Acid, like radioactive isotopes, has a Half-Life. A Half-Life is the specific time it takes for a particular substance to reduce by half of its original quantitative value. Now, it’s pretty evident that DNA is not a radioactive isotope, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that over time its bonds will start to break apart.

A study conducted by a team of scientists lead by Palaeogeneticist Morten Allentoft were set on determining DNA’s rate of decay and how long it would take for the genetic material to entirely fall apart. 158 DNA-containing bones all belonging to the Moa, an extinct giant bird. The bones were documented to be between 600 and 8,000 years old, preserved in nearly identical conditions making them ideal for this experiment.

From this, researchers calculated DNA to have a Half-Life of approximately 521 years. Essentially, this means that after 521 years, the bonds between the nucleotides would have broken, and in turn, the backbone of the DNA would have diminished. By the time 1,000 years would have rolled around, the DNA would be virtually gone.

With even the purest and ideal conditions for DNA to preserve in, scientists have calculated the maximum amount of time to be around 6 million years, which does not support potentially extracting 60 million-year-old Dino DNA.
If DNA decays over time, it is highly improbable that we would ever find well enough preserved DNA that you could extract, let alone modify and engineer it to bread an extinct species.

Is It Just?

Now, hypothetically if we had the technology and the abilities to bring back the extinct, weather that be dinosaurs or any other organism from the past, the question arises of would be ethically just?

Assuming we had the powers to do so, what would be stopping us. Although it would be exciting to bring something back to life, playing God and bringing back organisms that naturally died off wouldn’t be ethical for a number of reasons.

Firstly, we would be bringing back a living species that has already gone through its natural course of evolution and extinction. By bringing such species back that have passed through their evolutionary course, we would be exposing them to several different environments and challenges they would have to adapt to.

Secondly, we would be disrupting the natural order. Take the dinosaurs into account for this one. In this hypothetical situation, humans would be inviting a creature into our lives that could potentially replace us at the top of the food chain. Not only could that put humanity as a whole at risk, but it would disrupt ecosystems globally, throwing off the natural balance. Species could go extinct, and environments could drastically change, causing detrimental effects onto our world.

While the thought of seeing real-life dinosaurs in the modern day would be exciting, there is a multitude of different components that are preventing it from ever being a possibility. Now, if someday in the future, we could find a way to reverse evolution and bring something back from the dead, as of right now, it is virtually impossible for a world like Jurassic Park to become a reality.