![]() ![]() “It takes massive technical power to link these bits together. “DNA breaks down really fast, and even in a hundred years, it has broken up into tiny nonsense fragments,” says Mike Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. But despite all the effort, nobody has ever found even a single fragment of dinosaur DNA, much less the complete or near-complete genomes that would be necessary to clone a dinosaur,” he says. “We know that it would make our career if we were the first people to find it. However, she says, “there is increasing evidence that proteins and other soft tissues can preserve over geological timescales, so I think it would be unwise to say that we will definitely never be able to get DNA from dinosaur fossils.”Īnd for the past 25 years, since Jurassic Park hit cinemas, paleontologists across the world have been searching for fossilized dinosaur DNA, says Steve Brusatte, a National Geographic Explorer and author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. “The oldest DNA in the fossil record is only about a million years old, so it's not possible for us to reconstruct dinosaurs from their DNA like they did in the Jurassic Park movies,” says Susie Maidment, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, U.K. The nonavian dinosaurs were killed off when an asteroid or comet struck Earth 66 million years ago, and so far, it seems DNA hasn’t been preserved for long enough to be viable. ![]() Learn which ones were the largest and the smallest, what dinosaurs ate and how they behaved, as well as surprising facts about their extinction.īut science has actually gone one better than fiction since the first Jurassic Park film came out in 1993: In late 2016, paleontologists announced the discovery of most of a dinosaur tail in amber, with well-preserved feathers and skin.īut even with fossilized bits of dinosaur in amber and other excellently preserved dinosaurs that retain traces of their original organic material, the chances of finding intact dinosaur DNA remains, sadly, almost nonexistent. Over a thousand dinosaur species once roamed the Earth. ![]()
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