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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

Do we have the genetic sequence of any dinosaurs at all? Are we at the point, if we pushed aside ethical considerations, we could bring one to life?

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The half-life of DNA is about 500 years; the odds of finding any preserved sequences of dinosaur DNA longer than a few base pairs is pretty much nil. Even with very large samples, it simply would not be possible to recover any information from such fragments any more than you could reconstruct a book from a list of the syllables contained in a few million shredded copies.

You'd have an easier time modifying the genomes of modern-day birds and reptiles to produce something that looked like dinosaurs, but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology.

There are some birds even now that are "obviously" theropod dinosaurs (all birds are dinosaurs, but some are phenotypically closer to their ancestors than others). The sauropod lineage is truly dead though – birds are still their closest extant relatives, but the lineages diverged already in the late Triassic, ~230M years ago.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's a bit surprising that the link between ostriches and raptors (first fossil 1923 I think) in particular wasn't more noted which, of course, would have implied some link between theropods and modern birds more generally. There was some evidence like feathers on some dinosaurs but thinking about dinosaurs didn't really start changing en-masse until the late 1980s.

> but even this is far beyond the reach of current technology

I saw an article not too long ago about creating chicken embrios with teeth. Doesn't seem that far

Is that half life temperature dependent?

Yes, we have many sequences of avian dinosaurs (birds) and presumably future genome engineering methods will allow us to take those avian dinosaurs and give them the phenotype of titanosaurs and other extinct dinosaurs. But we will never be able to tell what DNA they had. It's gone. The best we can do is metabolomics.

Can we really know the phenotype of extinct dinosaurs, without their DNA? Whatever is left of these dinosaurs (fossils, prints…) probably doesn’t allow to know everything about the phenotype. We can guess, but we can’t know?

Birds, or as one might consider them, avian dinosaurs, as well as members of Crocodilia.

Would be great to use clicker training on them.

If you like the idea of owning and training dinosaurs, consider adopting a few chickens or guineafowl.

It was that picture in the article showing the size of that beast in relation to man that triggered this fantasy. Think Skinner’s ping pong playing pigeons - but scaled up to Godzilla size. Click & treat! :)

or like... some type of lizard?

Birds are in the clade ornithurae, which is within the clade dinosauria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird

I’m unaware of any lizards in that clade, so if you want to own dinosaurs, then the birds are a better option.

But there are many great (other) reptile pets as well, such as lizards.

No :'(

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