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Comment by iwwr | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean that an existing bird DNA can be minimally edited to express into a more lifesize dinosaur?

Birds, being dinosaurs and having the size they have, already are lifesize dinosaurs, no DNA editig required.

As to the question you probably meant to ask, no editing the DNA of a living organism to match the unknown DNA of an extinct organism it separated from a 100 Million years ago is impossible.

And here we see the importance of commas, why you shouldn't separate the negative from the verb by a mile and the difference between "no editing ... is impossible" - all edits are possible and "no, editing ... is impossible" - the edits are impossible.

Paleontologist Jack Horner is trying to do exactly that; see his TED talk "Building a dinosaur from a chicken" -- http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fro...

I wonder what's the likelihood of an actual dinosaur's survival in our current atmosphere. Oxygen levels might just be not high enough.

That's a great point; hadn't considered that myself before. I guess you could construct a chamber with the proper atmosphere, though, without too much difficulty. At the very least, it seems like an easier problem to solve than the whole bringing a dinosaur to life thing anyway.

That what first crossed my mind (because of theory of Polymorphism that I'm developing) , but maybe not because genetic mutation over time may have damaged the necessary DNA. Possibliy you can switch some gene and get deformed lifesize dinosaur.

Some birds already look & feel quite close e.g. cassowaries have a claw on their (degenerate) wings.

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