Quote from: Cvalda on Oct 11, 2014, 07:37:14 PM
Quote from: BANE on Oct 11, 2014, 07:29:57 PM
That doesn't mean it's gone in 521 years. You could still realistically get DNA from a million years old bones, and I have no idea about buried tree sap.
This doesn't really need to be said, but over 1.5 million years would be unreadable, so yes, Dinosaurs 65+ million years old would be utterly impossible.
No shit. Hence the entire premise of the original film being scientifically absurd.
Bane's right, the oldest known preserved DNA is around a million years old, and fragmented to the point that it's not currently workable.
Still, it wasn't implausible in the '80s when the story was written. At one point, it was thought it was just a question of finding the right piece of amber (although acquiring DNA is the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to cloning dinosaurs, most points of which Crichton did address within the fiction).
Personally, I can't believe it will never be possible to recreate a Mesozoic dinosaur. When I was growing up, I thought we'd never know what colour dinosaurs were, what they sounded like, how much time they spent in water, that we'd ever find preserved organic material, that we'd find dinosaurs in Antarctica, that we'd narrow down to a virtual certainty what wiped them out, that we'd find evidence of them burrowing underground, that we'd finally achieve a consensus that they were warm-blooded, that we'd find incontrovertible proof that birds were not only related to but
members of the Dinosauria, that my favourite dinosaur of the time would turn out to be covered in hairy proto-feathers and have wings, that Tyrannosaurus could bite through bone like we bite through mature cheddar, and that after 200 years of palaeontology, we'd still be finding entirely new major groups of dinosaurs and the first petrified remains. Etc, etc, etc.
The science has moved on at a mind-boggling pace for the last couple of decades, and I think it's just a matter of time before we find a way. It won't be an insect in amber, but maybe we'll be able to observe and reconstruct trace evidence of base pairs, or assemble such a thorough knowledge of the molecular clock that we're able to assemble the DNA of living birds' last common ancestor, or find enough protein in a bone to be properly workable.
And at that point, we'll be presented with the various questions posed by the story.
