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Comment by m23khan | Hacker News Reader

dumb question: what can scientists do with this besides studying the DNA data? Can they now clone that animal?

Not a dumb question. No, we can't clone it. It will be an incomplete genome, it's just a subset of the animal's entire DNA sequence, and it's reconstructed from proteins. We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.

> We've recovered some words from the ashes, and so we can tell what language the book was in, and where in history that book fits in with the language (comparing those words with other books with similar words), but we can't reconstruct the whole book yet.

If they had other teeth (from the same specimen or different ones of the same species), would they be able to just combine them to fill in the gaps?

To follow your metaphor, to me this sounds like finding different copies of the same printing, same edition, same book and combining them all to make a complete book. Does the metaphor fall apart?

Consider the size of the DNA "books": for example, the human genome is around 3 GB (uncompressed), much bigger than a single book on your shelf: King James Bible as plain text is around 4 MB (uncompressed), so it's a factor of roughly 1000 times (being always copied in every cell of your body!) and we have many complete copies and versions of older bibles but we still can't completely reconstruct too old versions. But we can have a reasonable reconstruction of the "tree" of the development of the known bibles.

And having just a single page from a bible can tell you quite good where that bible fits in the tree of all known bibles.

Thank you! I hadn't considered the size or amount missing from a given "book," that makes it much clearer.

We can look at the genomes of things alive today. They can be measured and compared, from these comparisons we can make educated guesses of what the genome of the long gone last common ancestor of closely related species might have looked like. With theories of "molecular clocks" (rates of ambient mutations) we can make guesses at how much time is needed to explain different amounts of change in genomes.

Here getting actual data from an ancient source beyond being interesting in its own right for rino lovers around the globe provides a reality check on the processes used for phylogenetic inferences across the tree of life

> what can scientists do with this?

Scientist's things. Increasing knowledge, conservation of extant species of endangered rhinos, understanding how Europe lost half of this big mammals fauna... Things like that.

An antiweather sweater made of wool of european woolly rhino looks badass on the other hand. If they have it in orange, I want one.

This is very interesting... IIRC previous estimates were about 1m years before DNA degraded too much to extract useful information. This seems to push that back a little bit.

Still, a Jurassic Park scenario is impossible. Even deeply frozen DNA isn’t stable over millions of years.

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