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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Nucleic acids are a more reactive species, and the half life of DNA is only on the order of 500 years or so.

The best bet we have to get something resembling dinosaurs is to invent them. By using extant theropod DNA, we could genetically engineer our way backwards. Basically improvisation.

The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.

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I once read a book about this: How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. The basic idea is that dinosaur DNA is carried around by modern day chickens. The concept seemed pretty out there but the book does make a convincing argument for why it should be possible. The first author is a well known paleontologist, and the book was recommended to me by a paleontologist before I spent the week (as a volunteer) in his field crew.

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> The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.

I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.

Still looking for hen's teeth, but they seem to be as scarce as chicken breasts. (The only breasts found so far are on mammals.)

"On February 29, 1980 (enough of a rarity in itself), E.J. Kollar and C. Fisher reported an ingenious technique for coaxing chickens to reveal some surprising genetic flexibility retained from a distant past."

-- Stephen Jay Gould, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

Two pages of technical explanation follow, but they got chicken embryo tissue to produce teeth.

If you used DNA across all birds, maybe it would be possible to identify the different bits of dinosaur DNA they inherited. Since they branched from each other at different points in time. And presumably wouldn’t have all lost the same genes.

Denesovian dna is a whole lot older than 500 years wooly mamoths, etc.And there is no such thing as "ethics", the absolute law of human endevor is that if a thing can be done for some gain, it will be done.The proof that there is no ethics is the fact that no technology has ever been proscribed, all technology has in fact been used for the most violent and/or profitable use that it can be put to, bar none. Peace and prosperity is the result of universal access to technology and violence, where there is no specific advantage to be exploited, not through "ethics" or morals. Ethics and morals, work in a household or tribe, or school,etc, but are completely absent from international type relationships. The faster we explore all of the possible implications of our newest technologys, the better, but its not going to be "nice" or the worst hell of all, fair.

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