The non-avian dinosaurs are gone now. But could they ever be brought back to life?

Can we resurrect extinct species? These are interesting questions that hinge on whether or not we can find or reconstruct dinosaur DNA. Why do you think it would be hard to get dinosaur DNA? Select the answer you think is correct. A - It is difficult to extract DNA from a cell. B - Dinosaur blood in a mosquito would be broken down in it's stomach. C - DNA molecules are delicate and break down over time. Or D - We can't find blood sucking insects in amber. The reason it is so hard to get extinct dinosaur DNA, is that DNA breaks down over time. Even mammoths, which have been found fully frozen in the Siberian Tundra, have proven to be very difficult. To get good DNA from. And they are only tens of thousands of years old. Not tens of millions. So C is the correct answer. In the movie Jurassic Park, scientists cloned dinosaurs using DNA extracted from blood sucking insects preserved in amber. Finding insects in amber is actually quite common. Even in Alberta, there are several sites that have produces amber with insects in them. We've learned about how rare it is for impressions of soft tissues to fossilize. And those soft tissues are usually filled in or replaced by minerals. So when we get a sample of fossilized skin, it isn't really the original skin that is preserved. It's an impression. It's almost unthinkable that blood would be preserved and that the tiny, delicate strands of DNA would survive tens or even hundreds of millions of years. That isn't the end of the story. Some amazing but controversial research on dinosaur bones from Montana, seems to suggest that sometimes dinosaur blood vessels could be preserved. When paleontologists broke open some of the leg

bones of Tyrannosaurus Rex, And a Hadrosaur called Brachylophosaurus. They found springy, elastic blood vessels. This opens the possibility for finding original dinosaur proteins. But we still aren't very likely to find complete DNA. As DNA breaks down very quickly after an animal dies. Some scientists are trying to reverse engineer a dinosaur from a bird. Because birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs, they may still have some of the genes needed to code for things like teeth, a long bony tail, or clawed fingers. This is a new field of study that requires a lot of complex laboratory techniques, and it really tells us more about developmental biology and the processes underlying evolution rather than evolving an extant species to an extinct one. A dinosaur. Engineered in this way wouldn't really be a resurrected species of dinosaur, but something new altogether. But what about other extinct species? Maybe something more recently extinct like a mammoth, or something that went extinct because of human actions, like a passenger pigeon. >> Do you think we could resurrect a recently extinct species? >> At this point, we don't know. Whether you think extinct species can be resurrected is a personal point of view, as the science of it is changing so quickly. So C is the correct answer. It might just be possible to bring more recently extinct species back to life. There are plans to use tissues from mammoths frozen in the Siberian Tundra to clone a mammoth. The nucleus of a mammoth cell would be implanted into the egg of a living elephant like how Dolly the sheep, was cloned. We haven't been able to grow a mammoth yet, but scientists have managed to clone an extinct species of frog and an extinct species of goat called the Pyrenean Ibex. Unfortunately, cloned animals rarely survive for very long. The Ibex lived only for a few minutes after it was born. And we had much better tissue samples for

these very recently extinct animals than we have even for animals that went extinct 50 or 100 years ago, let alone thousands. Or millions of years. We shouldn't count on seeing any dinosaurs in our lifetime. We should really be focusing our efforts on protecting the living descendents of dinosaurs, the birds, as well as all other species alive today. By conserving natural resources And protecting the environment. And that's our final lesson. My name is Betsy Cook, and it's been my pleasure to introduce you to the fascinating world of dinosaur paleobiology. >> We hope you had fun. And that you've learned something new about dinosaurs and critical scientific thinking. On behalf of Betsy and myself, and the entire Dino 101 team Congratulations on reaching the end of the course. Let us know what you thought about it. Head to the forums and give us your feedback. Exchange your ideas and questions with other Dino 101 students and our University of Alberta TAs. Together