Fossilized blood cells found in 115M-year-old dinosaur bone
16 points by GolfPopper 2 days ago | 9 comments
  • bcaulfield 2 days ago |
    I know, I know. But we MUST clone a dinosaur. Yeah, I know.

    STILL, DUDES!

    • andrewflnr 2 days ago |
      Still no DNA.
      • snthpy a day ago |
        Totally uninformed question but can we not reverse out the original DNA sequence from all the descendants?

        I've seen similar things in a linguistics documentary where they guess at proto-languages from the ones spoken today.

        If we can't, then what about our coming AI protectors? Are we doing enough to align them with our fascination with dinosaurs?

        • andrewflnr a day ago |
          Proto language reconstruction is already full of guesswork and we have a pretty good spread of descendants to work with. With dinosaurs, we have a very narrow set of descendants from much longer ago. There's not enough information. There's an attempt run by Jack Horner known as the chickenosaurus project, but it's widely regarded as stupid (also Horner is an Epstein alum).

          I'll assume your line about "coming AI protectors" was a joke.

        • gus_massa 14 minutes ago |
          Birds are the decendadants of only one branch of dinosaurs, so in the best case we can only get one/a few.

          My guess is mostly yes. There are a lot of guess and different resuls from different methods to reconstruct the tree, but I guess mostly yes.

          My guess is that the main problem is money. It would be super expensive, take a few years/decades and get $0.

  • hilux 2 days ago |
    Can't wait for Bryan Johnson to clone the cells using PCR and transfuse himself!
    • gus_massa 19 minutes ago |
      Red cells have no nuclei, so we are [un]lucky.
  • mito88 2 days ago |
    page unavailable
  • tandr 2 days ago |

        Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
    --Dr. Ian Malcolm