Quote from: Hellspawn28 on May 01, 2017, 12:09:33 AM
Quote from: Crazy Shrimp on Dec 08, 2016, 09:18:41 PM
QuoteThis is the first time that dinosaur skeletal material has been found in amber.
A Dinosaur's Bloody Feathered Tail Has Been Found Preserved in Amber
Would the DNA be good enough to clone it?
I don't think it's been examined for DNA yet, and the simple answer would be "almost certainly no", but palaeontology can be full of surprises. Off the top of my head, here are the stumbling blocks:
- DNA degrades fairly quickly, and all trace of it tends to vanish over a few thousand years even in highly preservative environments. I think the oldest definitively confirmed sample of DNA was a bit under a million years old.
- With pretty much any animal that became extinct before recorded history, you'd be looking at fragmented DNA, and we don't currently have the means to "fill in the gaps."
- Even if a full DNA sequence can be extracted or synthesised, there's the difficulty of creating a viable embryo from it. It's extremely rare for DNA implanted into an egg to successfully replicate, even when both come from members of the same species. *May* be possible, but there's the drawback that you'd need to mass-produce the DNA strand.
- To date, no animal that lays a calcified egg has ever been cloned. There may be further issues there.
- Assuming all these hurdles can be jumped, there's then the fun stuff of dealing with a living thing. Cloning presents a higher likelihood of stillbirth. There's a learning experience of what environmental conditions they need, and nutritional demands once they're born, or if grown in an incubator. Things that're toxic to it need discovering. There's the matter of its immune system, because offspring often develop their microbiome and associated systems from contact with their parent. And finally, there's social continuity - without parents to teach it how to be what it is, it's likely to behave abnormally.
So it's very unlikely to be possible even in such an extraordinary case as this one. I won't rule it out though - the last couple of decades in palaeontology have yielded things that were thought impossible or forever unknowable, or massively altered our understanding. The most relevant of which in this case was the discovery that Mesozoic organic material can survive to the present day. We're talking proteins, not intact DNA, but still...
