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Dinosaur Resurrection: Can the Impossible Happen?
"Welcome to Jurassic Park." Anyone who hears those famous words knows it's a reference to the movie Jurassic Park based off the novel by Michael Crichton. In the famous plot, scientists had recovered dinosaur DNA from seventy million year old mosquitoes that had been trapped in amber and recreated a dinosaur. Is this possible? Can we recreate a dinosaur? The idea seems very tempting. Who wouldn't want to see a dinosaur up close? Also, how does a popular debate fit into today's genetics and recreating a dinosaur? Did today's birds evolve from dinosaurs? I think the birds we see outside everyday were from the dinosaurs. I don't think we truly can recreate a dinosaur, but how deep will we go into genetics to try?

To start off, one should ask: Is it possible to recreate a dinosaur? How could we? What do we need? The most important item to recreate a dinosaur is a source of DNA. But where can we get seventy million year old DNA? By reading Jurassic Park, one might think of using amber. Two scientists did just that. Raul Cano and his former student Hendrik Poinar did the first attempt to extract DNA from amber in 1992. These two scientists had used a forty million year old bee stuck in amber. After many trials, they had finally come up with a tiny sequence. Would it contain some extinct species? It turns out that it didn't. In the following years, there would be no other successful trials by any scientists, and therefore it was believed that those few fragments were contaminants.
So, using DNA from amber was unsuccessful. But, if we can get long strands of DNA from forty thousand year old mammoth bones and from a forty-five thousand year old Neanderthal's bones, why can't we get a strand from a dinosaur bone? Well, DNA is weak. Compared to the bare minimum of sixty-five million years for dinosaur DNA, forty thousand years is a fraction of one second. Scientists don't believe DNA can last more than a few million years because of the bacteria, water, changes in temperature, and cosmic rays that wear away DNA in from bones in decaying bodies. So, it seems that extracting DNA from bones is also unsuccessful. It seems as unlikely that we can recreate a dinosaur.
Some scientists do not think it is possible to truly create a dinosaur. They say this because if we do somehow extract dinosaur DNA, we could only get a fragment of one strand. If this somehow luckily happens, how could we tell which dinosaur it would

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