In the movie “Jurassic Park,” a scientist learned how to clone dinosaurs and created an entire amusement park on a desert island, where you could see a living ancient animal. However, the hypothesis about the possibility of cloning dinosaurs from fossil remains, which was so relevant after the release of the film “Jurassic Park,” ultimately turned out to be untenable.
Australian scientists led by Morten Allentoft and Michael Bunce from Murdoch University (Western Australia) have proven that it is impossible to “recreate” a living dinosaur.
Researchers radiocarbon dated bone tissue taken from the fossilized bones of 158 extinct moa birds. These unique and huge birds lived in New Zealand, but 600 years ago they were completely destroyed by the Maori aborigines. As a result of research, scientists have found that the amount of DNA in bone tissue decreases over time - every 521 years, the number of molecules is reduced by half.
The last DNA molecules disappear from bone tissue after about 6.8 million years. At the same time, the last dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, that is, about 65 million years ago - long before the critical threshold for DNA of 6.8 million years, and there were no DNA molecules left in the bone tissue of the remains that archaeologists were able to find.
“As a result, we found that the amount of DNA in bone tissue, if kept at a temperature of 13.1 degrees Celsius, decreases by half every 521 years,” said research team leader Mike Bunce.
“We extrapolated this data to other, higher and lower temperatures and found that if you keep bone tissue at a temperature of minus 5 degrees, the last DNA molecules will disappear in about 6.8 million years,” he added.
Sufficiently long fragments of the genome can only be found in frozen bones no more than a million years old.
By the way, to date, the most ancient DNA samples have been isolated from the remains of animals and plants found in permafrost. The age of the found remains is about 500 thousand years.
It is worth noting that scientists will conduct further research in this area, since differences in the age of the remains are responsible for only 38.6% of the discrepancies in the degree of DNA destruction. The rate of DNA decay is influenced by many factors, including the conditions of storage of remains after excavations, chemical composition soil and even the time of year in which the animal died.
That is, there is a chance that in conditions eternal ice or underground caves, the half-life of the genetic material will be longer than geneticists assume.
Is it possible to clone a mammoth?
Scientists of the Yakut North-Eastern federal university and the Seoul Stem Cell Research Center signed an agreement on working together over cloning a mammoth. Scientists will try to revive the ancient animal using the remains of a mammoth found in permafrost. The mammoth is only about 60,000 years old and thanks to the cold it has been almost completely preserved. A modern Indian elephant was chosen for the experiment, since its genetic code is as similar as possible to the DNA of mammoths.
According to approximate forecasts of scientists, the results of the experiment will be known no earlier than in 10–20 years.
The topic of human cloning is developing not so much in a scientific way, but in a social and ethical one, causing controversy on the topic of biological safety, self-identification of a “new person”, the possibility of the emergence of defective people, also giving rise to religious disputes. At the same time, animal cloning experiments are being carried out and have examples of successful completion.
The world's first clone, the tadpole, was created back in 1952. Soviet researchers were among the first to successfully clone a mammal back in 1987. It was an ordinary house mouse.
The most striking milestone in the history of cloning living beings was the birth of Dolly the sheep - this is the first cloned mammal obtained by transplanting the nucleus of a somatic cell into the cytoplasm of an egg lacking its own nucleus. Dolly the sheep was a genetic copy of the donor sheep.
If in natural conditions Each organism combines the genetic characteristics of its father and mother, then Dolly had only one genetic “parent” - the prototype sheep. The experiment was carried out by Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell at the Roslyn Institute in Scotland in 1996 and was a breakthrough in technology.
Later, British and other scientists conducted experiments on cloning various mammals, including horses, bulls, cats and dogs.
03/09/2016 at 01:28
The idea of cloning dinosaurs from fossil remains was especially relevant after the release of the film “Jurassic Park,” which tells how a scientist learned to clone dinosaurs and created an entire amusement park on a desert island, where one could see a living ancient animal with one’s own eyes.
But a few years ago, Australian scientists under the leadership of Morten Allentoft and Michael Bunce from Murdoch University (Western Australia) proved that it is impossible to “Recreate” a living dinosaur.
Researchers radiocarbon dated bone tissue taken from the fossilized bones of 158 extinct moa birds. These unique and huge birds lived in New Zealand, but 600 years ago they were completely destroyed by the Maori aborigines. As a result, scientists found that the amount of DNA in bone tissue decreases over time - every 521 years, the number of molecules is reduced by half.
The last DNA molecules disappear from bone tissue after about 6.8 million years. At the same time, the last dinosaurs disappeared from the face of the earth at the end of the Cretaceous period, that is, about 65 million years ago - long before the critical threshold for DNA of 6.8 million years, and there were no DNA molecules left in the bone tissue of the remains that paleontologists were able to find.
“As a result, we found out that the amount of DNA in Bone Tissue, if kept at a Temperature of 13.1 degrees Celsius, decreases by half every 521 years,” said the head of the research team, Mike Bunce.
"We have Extrapolated this Data to Other, Higher and Lower Temperatures and Found that If Contained Bone Tissue at a Temperature of Minus 5 Degrees, then the Last DNA Molecules Will Disappear in About 6.8 million years,” he added.
Sufficiently long fragments of the genome can only be found in frozen bones no more than a million years old.
By the way, to date, the most ancient DNA samples have been isolated from the remains of animals and plants found in permafrost. The age of the found remains is about 500 thousand years.
It is worth noting that scientists will conduct further research in this area, since differences in the age of the remains are responsible for only 38.6% of the discrepancies in the degree of DNA destruction. The rate of DNA decay is influenced by many factors, including the storage conditions of the remains after excavations, the chemical composition of the soil, and even the time of year in which the animal died.
That is, there is a chance that in conditions of eternal ice or underground caves, the half-life of genetic material will be longer than geneticists assume.
How about a mammoth?
Reports that scientists have found remains suitable for cloning appear regularly. Several years ago, scientists from the Yakut Northeastern Federal University and the Seoul Center for Stem Cell Research signed an agreement to work together on cloning a mammoth. Scientists planned to revive the ancient animal using biological material found in permafrost.
A modern Indian elephant was chosen for the experiment, since its genetic code is as similar as possible to the DNA of mammoths. Scientists predicted that the results of the experiment would be known no earlier than in 10-20 years.
This year, messages from scientists from the North-Eastern Federal University appeared again; they reported the discovery of a mammoth that lived in Yakutia 43 thousand years ago. The collected genetic material suggests that intact DNA has been preserved, but experts are skeptical - after all, cloning requires very long DNA chains.
Living clones.
The topic of human cloning is developing not so much in a scientific manner as in a social and ethical one, causing controversy on the topic of biological safety, self-identification of the “New Man”, the possibility of the emergence of defective people, and also giving rise to religious controversy. At the same time, animal cloning experiments are being carried out and have examples of successful completion.
The world's first clone, the tadpole, was created back in 1952. Soviet researchers were among the first to successfully clone a mammal (house mouse) back in 1987.
The most striking milestone in the history of cloning living beings was the birth of Dolly the sheep - this is the first cloned mammal obtained by transplanting the nucleus of a somatic cell into the cytoplasm of an egg devoid of its own nucleus. Dolly the sheep was a genetic copy of the cell donor sheep (that is, a genetic clone.
Only if, under natural conditions, each organism combines the genetic characteristics of its father and mother, then Dolly had only one genetic “Parent” - the prototype sheep. The experiment was carried out by Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell at the Rosslyn Institute in Scotland in 1996 and was a breakthrough in technology.
Later, British and other scientists conducted experiments on cloning various mammals, including horses, bulls, cats and dogs.
Probably every reader has seen the film by the famous director S. Spielberg about an island where cloned giant lizards roam in an amusement park. At one time, after watching the film, many wondered: is a dinosaur clone a myth or reality?
The most interesting thing is that this question interested not only idle onlookers. Genetic scientists, funded by very wealthy people, have taken up the problem of cloning in earnest.
Dinosaur DNA is gone
Australian billionaire Clive Palmer, who became famous for creating a copy of the infamous Titanic, was inspired by the idea of creating his own park with giant lizards. To do this, you just need to get a clone of these prehistoric creatures, but is such a task possible for a person, even if he has a tightly stuffed wallet (sorry, suitcase) of money? Unfortunately, no, the scientists answered.
For a long time, Australian researchers have been working on the problem of preserving DNA in the bones of ancient birds and the likelihood of obtaining it. The tests were carried out on the bones of ancient birds called moas.
These giants once inhabited New Zealand, but five hundred years ago they were practically destroyed by the local population. Genetic scientists studied bones whose age reached 8 thousand years or more. It turned out that DNA molecules disintegrated quite quickly in the bones. After one and a half million years, the genetic material cannot be used for reading, and after seven million years it completely disintegrates. And even ancient insects encased in amber do not possess any DNA.
The most famous dinosaurs
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Tyrannosaurus(aka Tyrannosaurus Rex). This is an unsurpassed predator, a real killing machine. Old Rex is familiar to anyone who has watched Jurassic Park. It is believed that, given its enormous dimensions, the lizard was capable of reaching speeds of up to 60 km/h. |
Diplodocus. This peaceful herbivorous lizard had an impressive size - its body length reached 40 meters! Diplodocus spent most of its life in water, and they came to land to eat or lay eggs. |
Triceratops. Characteristic feature This massive dinosaur features three horns and an openwork “collar” around its neck. The appearance of Triceratops bore some resemblance to the modern rhinoceros. This dinosaur weighed about 12 tons and was a herbivore. |
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Pterodactyl. Representative of Jurassic aviation. What can you say about this lizard? It had a rather large beak with teeth, and the wingspan of the “bird” reached 12 meters. Pterodactyl could snatch fish out of the water on the fly, thanks to its dexterous paws with “fingers.” |
Allosaurus. Another terrible predator that attacks its prey in a jump. The jaw of the Allosaurus had approximately 70 teeth, ranging from 10 to 15 cm in length. The long and muscular tail helped the predator maintain balance when walking and running. |
Plesiosaur. This is an aquatic lizard with an incredibly long neck. Some believe that the famous monster of Loch Ness may be a descendant of a plesiosaur. The main diet of this lizard was fish. The plesiosaur had large flippers, which allowed it to maneuver in the aquatic environment. |
Chicken ancestors could bite painfully
No one even doubts that scientific research in the field of paleontology will continue, but the conclusion has already been made. He tells us that it is impossible to create an amusement park with giant lizards. But don't be upset! Extinct giants can be revived in another way.
How often do we eat chicken? But we don’t even think for a minute that this is the meat of a descendant of a prehistoric lizard. It's funny that our chicken and the ancient monster have similar DNA, and the chicken embryo is equipped with a large scaly tail and saber-toothed jaws. What is the task facing genetic scientists at the present time? They had the opportunity to study the genetic information of a bird to obtain a dinosaur.
Relatively recently, American researchers came to the conclusion that the composition of ostrich blood is very similar to the composition of the blood of giant lizards. And this discovery gives hope for obtaining the DNA of these extinct individuals. In all likelihood, a lot of interesting things await us. And maybe we will be able to see a real “dinosaur park” with our own eyes.
Genetic engineering is one of the most revolutionary sciences. Scientists are still discussing its possible ban. And while they are arguing, the cloning process is successfully underway in scientific laboratories. Everyone is interested in knowing how things are going with dinosaur cloning.
There is a dubious theory according to which the DNA of a dinosaur can be isolated from the blood of a female mosquito that bit it. This insect is supposedly preserved in amber. This dinosaur clone successfully appeared in the film Jurassic Park.
Of course, it is unlikely to find such a mosquito that bit a pangolin a second ago and immediately fell into a drop of pine resin. There is also great doubt about the fact that dinosaur DNA is pure form could be preserved in amber. The hypothesis itself leads to only one conclusion - DNA must be searched for or somehow recreated, but how exactly is still difficult to say.
Almost all Scientific minds are very skeptical about the possibility of finding dinosaur DNA. They give the following reasons: 1. Over the course of 500,000 years, any DNA structure can collapse if it is not exposed to low temperatures. 2.no one has yet managed to find whole DNA; these are always short pieces of a chain that cannot be connected. 3. The most difficult thing is to sift out the pieces of genetic material we need from foreign DNA that was introduced by chance later or simply belongs to bacteria from the era of life of a given dinosaur.
But when a person has a dream, then “the fairy tale becomes reality.” And the impossible becomes possible.
2010 can be called the year of a breakthrough in the history of DNA reconstruction. 50-75 thousand years ago, extinct ancient people, the Denisovans, lived on Earth together with Neanderthals. Paleontologists managed to find the remains of a Denisovan girl. Experts were able to decipher the child’s genetic code, since know-how had been developed before this
— reconstruction of fragments of a DNA molecule consisting of a single chain. This discovery became the basis for further clues to evolutionary development on Earth.
2013 another breakthrough! The remains of an ancient horse were found in permafrost. They are 550 - 780 thousand years old. Scientists manage to read this genome.
Then another sensation - specialists manage to decipher the mitochondrial DNA of Heidelberg man. This type of Neanderthal lived approximately 400 thousand years ago. In parallel with this, work is being successfully carried out on the genetic structure of the remains of a bear that lived at the same time. The most surprising thing is that the remains of both man and bear were found not in permafrost, but in a warmer climate. What does this mean? It is possible to clone ancient animals not only from frozen remains, but to expand the area of searching for DNA fragments using a new technique.
This technique, like all ingenious things, is simple. To purify the desired DNA from the presence of foreign DNA, Scientists created a so-called DNA template: gene sequences of 45 nucleotides were taken (longer chains are unlikely to be preserved) with existing mutations that occurred after the death of an individual (certain nucleotide substitutions appear after the death of a cell). Then, after analyzing this piece of genetic material, they found the closest DNA, which made it possible to build the correct chain of genes. This is reminiscent of working on puzzles - the overall picture is there, you just need to put it together correctly in small pieces. The Denisovan genome was best suited for this purpose.
This method only works when there is the following base:
1.successful template for genome reconstruction
2. a sufficient number of DNA chain fragments.
We gain new knowledge and a new template with each new transcript. And we delve into the study of more accurate historical events. But so far all these discoveries are limited by a period of no more than 800,000 years. So what about the dinosaurs that lived on Earth from 225 to 65 million years ago? Over such a long period of time, not a single intact DNA molecule would have been preserved, but even here science does not stop at one place.
In the Chernyshevsky region, scientists discovered fragments of fossilized skin of a dinosaur that lived in the Jurassic Period. Scientists have raised the question of real cloning of dinosaurs. Dozens of news agencies showed interest in Transbaikalia in connection with this discovery. Foreign and Russian Scientists came to the institute and admitted that they had never seen anything like this in their lives.
Cloning, of course, has not yet been put on the conveyor belt, and experiments are still being conducted in private or departmental university laboratories. Russian researchers are now hard at work cloning a mammoth. The mammoth genetic material itself is not very difficult to obtain. Let us remember the baby mammoth Dima, who was found whole. Actually, mammoths lived only a few thousand years ago, so their frozen remains have been found more than once in Siberia. There is evidence that back in the 19th century, Siberian hunters fed their dogs mammoth meat. Of course, make a mammoth clone from the entire preserved chain of DNA and protein good quality does not pose much difficulty for specialists.
It's much more difficult to clone a dinosaur. According to Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences Sofia Sinitsa, the period of DNA decay depends on the conditions under which the remains are found and is 500 thousand years. And we must take into account that dinosaurs went extinct approximately 65 million years ago. But many of them lived 150 million years BC. WELL, HOW DO YOU FIND DINOSAUR DNA? The shelf life of DNA baffles researchers. After all, organic tissue is transformed into minerals over millions of years. In rocks that can be analyzed, it actually does not exist. Sofya Sinitsa places a special emphasis on the fact that nothing works with dinosaur skin, in which organic matter could be preserved, and therefore cloning of dinosaurs will have to be done only after geneticists have successfully cloned a mammoth. The scientist promises that in order to find the source material for cloning lizards, she will “dig up all of Siberia.”
You remember very well from the school curriculum that DNA plays the function of transmitting hereditary information. If one of the researchers can find one single completely preserved cell with a complete set of DNA molecules, then further cloning of an exact copy is simply a matter of technology. For example, take the egg of a modern Komodo dragon, destroy the original DNA, and introduce DNA molecules from any species of dinosaur into the egg. Now you can put the egg in a special incubator and wait for the birth of the little dinosaur.
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Cloning animals is becoming commonplace. Gradually, scientists are taking on extinct species and dream of bringing the mammoth and Neanderthal back to life. But what about dinosaurs?
The film “Jurassic Park” revolutionized the world of science: international projects appeared to study the remains and DNA of ancient lizards, and the number of paleontologists increased 4 times. Everyone was motivated by interest and the desire to give a definitive answer to the question of whether it is possible to clone those who lived on Earth 60 million years before the appearance of man.
Since the early 2000s, scientists' opinions have varied. Skeptics said goodbye to their childhood dream: even if they possess such technology, people are unlikely to use it to recreate a dinosaur that has no place in the modern world. But there are those who think differently.
website briefly explains how scientists hope to revive ancient fossils in the near future and what results can be talked about today. Dedicated to everyone who dreamed of seeing a live tyrannosaurus - do not despair, there is still hope.
But skeptics warn that even if a dinosaur-like creature hatches in the future, it will always be a chicken first and foremost, not an ancient species of lizard.
Already now: There is a way to activate in birds those genes, thanks to which sharp teeth grow again on the beak, the tail familiar to a dinosaur develops, and paws. This is how scientists gradually edit the DNA of a chicken, programming the embryo to develop body parts that ancient lizards had.
4. Cloning a creature from a preserved DNA sample, like in the movie “Jurassic Park”
When the movie Jurassic Park came out, the ability to clone a dinosaur with a blood sample seemed incredibly promising. In 2007, it was possible to extract collagen protein from the bones of a tyrannosaurus and read fragments of its DNA, and two years later they isolated proteins from the bones of an 80-million-year-old brachylophosaurus.
This idea is like a time machine: first clone or create likenesses of those whose DNA remains intact, then use the genes of these creatures to further work. And perhaps create a brave new world, similar to the one that existed millions of years ago.
Modern technologies make it possible to bring recently extinct animals and birds back to life. Success requires intact DNA, whose age does not exceed 500 thousand years, a surrogate mother from among living close relatives, a suitable ecological environment for the development of the organism, and a little luck.
Today, Harvard scientists, led by geneticist George Church, are trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth using the genes of modern elephants. In fact, this is the creation of a new genome manually. The resulting animal will not be an exact replica of a mammoth, but it will be similar.
Other contenders to return to the world of the living include white rhinoceroses, the passenger pigeon, heath grouse and those critically endangered such as horseshoe crabs and the American ferret.
2. We are looking for unknown forms of life on our planet in order to study the mechanisms and functions of genes, create new species and resurrect old ones
edited by cryobiology. Although some creatures are able to live for several days in a state of hibernation, being frozen. At the moment, scientists have not developed a method that will help start life processes in the body, which has been exposed to low temperatures for a long time.
Already now: Worms from Yakutia, frozen 40 thousand years ago in the permafrost region, have become a mystery to science. Recently they were resurrected thanks to scientists: the ice was melted and the worms came to life. It is still difficult to say how their adaptation to modern world: New bacteria and viruses have appeared that these worms have never encountered. It's a problem that cryogenics enthusiasts who hope to freeze themselves today to be revived in the distant future are being warned about.
Of course, scientists may be wrong in certain theories, but, as Jules Verne said, “everything that a person can imagine in his imagination, others can bring to life.”
Which extinct creature would you like to see alive?