Dolly the T-Rex?

By | March 24, 2005
3 Comments

First there was this startling announcement:

A frozen mammoth dug up from the Siberian tundra has been unveiled in central Japan in a preview of the six-month World Exposition, which is expected to draw millions of tourists.

A group of Russian and Japanese scientists hope to clone mammoths from the animal’s remains by using elephant egg cells.

The multimillion-dollar project between Russia and Japan to examine the beast is intended to find out why mammoths became extinct in the Ice Age.

And then this one:

For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.

If scientists can isolate proteins from the material, they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, said lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

If the Japanese scientists are able to pull of their ambitious mammoth project, what are the chances that we might get to see an actual living dinosaur one of these days?

I guess that’s still pretty hard to say, but I’ll tell you one thing for sure. They’re definitely going up.

  • http://beyondwords.typepad.com/beyond_words/ Kathy

    The chances are going up–but they’re still a long way off. They’d have to find a complete cell nucleus wouldn’t they? We don’t know enough about DNA encoding to repair incomplete chromosomes–. But wouldn’t it be awesome to see a living dinosaur? What’s your favorite? I’m partial to alosauri.Large enough to be awesome but not predators…

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Phil Bowermaster

    Maybe they could use frog DNA to fill in the gene sequence gaps like in Jurassic Park. I’ve decided that Barney (the smaller of my two dogs) was probably produced by some kind of interspecies gene splicing. He loves birds! When I take him to the pet store, he likes to be held up so he can see the parrots. Sometimes they’ll even come over and give him a kiss.

    I could have sworn alosauri were predators. Personally, I’d like to see a plessiosaur in action. I think they should breed a family of them and put one in Loch Ness, one in Lake Champlain, etc.

    But then, the poor things would probably just want to go sit on a lilly pad or something…

  • stephen

    oh come on you aren’t serious!if they do revive the dinosaur species it’ll be a masacre!the dinosaurs died of for a reason and that may very well be the reason we were able to evolve from fish or monkeys or something!i tell you it’ll be trouble to reveive the dinosaur species!