Scientists find collagen inside a 195M-year-old bone

1. DNA is transcribed into RNA. Structurally, RNA is very similar to DNA. RNA has some different bases and its key characteristic is that it has an additional 2' OH group, making it less stable (more reactive) than DNA. Multiple copies of an RNA transcript can be created from a single transcription frame--eg gene(s), making it easier to produce more protein in parallel.

2. RNA is translated into protein. Amino acids are very different from the DNA and RNA base pairs, and one of the consequences is that the structures are subject to folding and adopting secondary and tertiary conformations.

Another poster said to think of protein as the "machine". While this is largely true, the biochemical reality is more subtle. Both DNA and RNA also assume mechanical behaviors--that's a bit beyond this discussion though.

While we can map polypeptides (protein) back to RNA and DNA, we lose some of the DNA: promoter regions that signal to transcription factors, spliced out code, non-coding regions (introns), etc. All of these are extremely important to biology.

DNA has a relatively short half life (521 years), which is why we haven't found any from dinosaurs.

These finds are great for comparative studies on protein evolution, but will be grossly insufficient to ever clone dinosaurs. We're missing billions of base pairs of data, and I'm not sure where we'd ever find them. I think inventing a time machine would be more likely than getting the data from fossils, unfortunately.

They found protein, which you can't even consider cloning from (Protein is like the machine, while DNA is the blueprint to make that machine). One use is that if you find a lot of these proteins in different dinosaurs, you might be able to map out the differences to figure out who is related to who.