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Comment by ggg9990 | Hacker News Reader

Consequences be damned, if I could make Jurassic Park, I would.

If we are able to get any DNA out amber that would be amazing. From what I understand DNA is not stable for that long. If we are able to get any DNA it would probably be inferred some microscopic structures or something left behind from the DNA. However, even then I doubt it would be complete. So why it would be amazing it would just be tiny fragments of DNA. I doubt we will even get a tiny fragment. So highly doubt we will ever get enough genetic information to be able resurrect a dinosaur. Even if we would could fill in the blanks with bird DNA.

So even if you wanted to I don't think you could. However, a mammoth for instance might be possible to clone.

DNA has a half-life. If you find 100gr of "intact" cells, it's not going to be a problem to extract the DNA.

Isn't that why they used frogs DNA? To finish incomplete sequences as a heuristic?

Also: life uh... uh finds a way.

If you imagine finding some big stash of amber with, say, 1 million different dinosaur fragments preserved, you could imagine using some statistical techniques combined with knowledge of extant related species to put something together.

yea and from my understanding it's only ~500 years or so. So a 160 million years is how old the article says that amber is. So that means what ever amount of dna would have been gone through it's half life over 300,000 times. Just thinking about that makes me absolutely certain that we would not even find an intact base-pair, and a single base pair is not even useful for cloning.

It's not happening unless there is some natural mechanism that increase that half life of DNA quite a bit, and is stable for millions of years. Otherwise we would need the DNA to leave some byproduct that we can detect.

Just make veggiesaurs.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." :D

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