bringing back extinct animals?

Post Reply New Topic

Buy-100-PPC-Common.

The end of dinos was when they became too big to fail. Farther back they started small, and overclocking a tadpole will produce something.

A little chicken DNA and you have an intermediate reptile, amphibian, bird. New species will develop according to what is available to eat.

The Garbageasaurus seems likely. With some Termite DNA they could eat wood, paper, and some species do collect metals.

It could solve the landfill problem, but if we ran out of garbage, humans do look and smell like garbage.

I would bring back the Dodo.

Then when they're shown at the zoo, add two extra Os, and make it look the display says "doo-doo".

Here's (link) an article about a group attempting to "breed a dinosaur" from a chicken. Of course, that's not technically correct, since chickens are already dinosaurs, or rather, members of the "dinosauria" family. So are all other birds. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the article:

“Birds are dinosaurs, so technically we're making a dinosaur out of a dinosaur. The only reason we're using chickens, instead of some other bird, is that the chicken genome has been mapped, and chickens have already been exhaustively studied."

Basically, they're shutting down some of the regulation that causes chickens to have less dinosaurian characteristics, like shorter tail, fused fingers, and toothless beaks. If they're successful, they'll have something much more distinctly dinosaurian.

A lot of people don't realize that most theropod dinosaurs were feathered, so this would be quite a "blast from the past". I, personally, can't wait to see what happens.

Imagine the pigeon problem in any major city. Now imagine the problem when the pigeons are turned into little pterosaurs and become carnivorous. Convert chickens into little raptors and imagine them running wild in the sewers. Or running amuck in the heartland, raiding ranches for livestock.

scratchmonkey, I don't know for sure, but I doubt that allowing for longer tails, toothed beaks, and fingers in chickens would turn them into ravenous killers. Besides, aren't most birds carnivorous already? Regressed chickens are unlikely to be much more rowdy than pulling worms from the ground and plucking bugs off of trees, just like other birds are, now. It's a fun thought experiment, though. "The Birds" certainly would be a lot different.

Come to think of it, they probably shouldn't mess around too much with birds of prey, though...

Oh, while I'm thinking of it, birds are not descendants of pterosaurs. Pterosaurs are quite different from modern or ancient theropods (bipedal dinosaurs, including birds, t-rexes, and velociraptors). No, I don't think there's any way to get a pterosaur in this manner, unfortunately, since there do not appear to be any surviving descendants at all. Of course, even if we did, it almost certainly couldn't fly in our environment, so it wouldn't really be that dangerous. A t-rex would have similar mechanical problems, stemming from its size. Some have postulated that a t-rex, running at 55mpg, would snap its head clear off if it made a sharp turn.

Many of the species which perished did so because their habitat disappeared. Without the habitat into which they evolved, even if the genome could be restored, the organisms with that genome will not be able to survive.

There is more to a species than its genome. There is its matching environment.

ruveyn

There's a lot of evidence humans took out a number of megafauna. Also, given the close relation to modern-day elephants, the Mammoth might be easy enough to bring back. If I'm not mistaken, we already found one frozen in ice. With the right tools, I don't see why we couldn't extract the DNA, and clone it into an elephant's embryo.

The major issue is as others have said, environment. How are you going to feed it once it's back? We'll probably have PETA breathing down our neck for the first few years.

I think scientists are bringing back the tasmanian tiger.

[quote="tommyg"]Here's (link) an article about a group attempting to "breed a dinosaur" from a chicken. Of course, that's not technically correct, since chickens are already dinosaurs, or rather, members of the "dinosauria" family. So are all other birds. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the article:

Ten years ago PBS ran a show about the question of making Jurassic Park real- if its possible.
And they explored the idea making modern birds into dinosaurs by messing with the birds genome. They concluded that at best you could make a bird into "a walking collection of dinosaur parts, but it wouldnt really be a dinosaur."

Still-it could be interesting. Ten years ago they got a hen to grow a tooth- I guess thats a step!