From fantasy to reality: Can we recreate dinosaurs like what happened in Jurassic Park?

Have you ever been camping in the wild? Imagine camping in a dense forest, only to wake up in the middle of the night to find the shadow of prehistoric feral reptiles sniffing around your tent!

Welcome to Jurassic Park!

If you were like me as a child, you probably loved dinosaurs, and the tense scenes in Jurassic Park (and later the Jurassic World series) likely impressed you greatly. Dinosaurs are similar to dragons, superheroes and fairies, except that they already existed on our planet. The last time they roamed Earth was about 65 million years ago, before a giant asteroid hit Earth, leading to their extinction.

Thanks to the tremendous efforts of director Steven Spielberg, we have seen an impressive collection of Paleolithic creatures come to life – at least on the big screen!

Can we create life from DNA?

In films, scientists used DNA to bring back a group of dinosaurs of different types and sizes. They achieved this by extracting dinosaur DNA from a mosquito that was trapped and preserved in a piece of amber.

While the hypothesis sounds very exciting, the question is: could it really be real? Is it possible to recreate dinosaurs from their own DNA and build a real Jurassic park?

The cell of an adult animal contains all the DNA needed to form other cells, and thus another animal entirely. Scientists have often used a technique called cloning to make copies of cells, genes, tissues and even entire organisms in the lab. The process involves creating identical copies or multiple copies of a specific piece of DNA (even if it is a very small piece of DNA).

Did you know about the sheep Dolly? It was the first mammal to be cloned using this process. Many animals have since been cloned, including frogs, pigs, horses, mice, sheep and cows.

However, the dinosaur is a long-lost monster, which is very different from the cloning of the sheep Dolly. Bringing back an extinct species from the dead can be a big deal, literally.

Has dinosaur DNA been found?

No, we have not yet found the dinosaur DNA that may be necessary for successful dinosaur cloning.

To clone a dinosaur, it's not just about finding DNA, but also finding a complete set or enough pieces of dinosaur DNA. This is because we need to assemble the small pieces to recreate the whole puzzle - the genome. Each genome is made up of millions of DNA sequences. If we can determine the order or sequence of bases within DNA, we can reassemble them again.

Without the ability to fully sequence the genome, we wouldn't have the full picture of how dinosaurs were recreated.

We found dinosaur eggs and bones. Can't we extract DNA from them?

Unlikely. Research shows that DNA molecules degrade over time. The last dinosaur died more than 65 million years ago, so DNA is currently unavailable or accessible today.

Hard parts of the body, such as bones and teeth, remain behind even after millions of years, but DNA, the essential material needed for an organism, is very sensitive.

Even if some DNA survives, it may not contain enough information to tell us the full story of dinosaur biology.

Paleontologists agree that the Jurassic World chain hypothesis is based on an inaccurate idea of how long DNA can be preserved in nature, and in what ways. Therefore, it is doubtful that dinosaur DNA can be cloned by extracting prehistoric blood from a mosquito found in amber.

Thus, the idea of sequencing and manipulating dinosaurs' DNA remains fiction... At least for now.

Some scientists claim to have discovered the entire sequenced DNA of dinosaurs in the fossils, but the evidence remains unconfirmed. However, researchers and scientists continue to search for it around the world.

Even if we find the DNA of a dinosaur, can we clone a dinosaur?

So, the question remains... Even if we could extract a whole strand of DNA from well-preserved fossils, or if we could genetically engineer that DNA, would that mean we could bring back the dinosaurs?

Very unexpected. The challenges are too many and too great.

First, we need to insert dinosaur DNA into a modern-day animal that is closely related to dinosaurs and has a very similar genome (such as birds or reptiles) in order to modify it in its egg. Finding a close relative of a species missing millions of years ago is not entirely easy.

This sounds like a huge task, considering we have the entire sequencing genome of the woolly mammoths. In addition, we have identified one of his relatives: the Asian elephant. However, we are still unable to bring him back from the dead.

Even if this attempt succeeds, this combination will not be a real dinosaur anyway. For example, who has the DNA closest to dinosaurs? It is believed that birds descend directly from dinosaurs. So, as we try to hatch a dinosaur from a chicken egg, against all odds, we'll only be able to create a hybrid dinosaur – like Chicosaurus!

Despite having the best technology and advances in genetic engineering and cloning, scientists are currently unable to clone actual dinosaurs. This is primarily because their DNA is too old to be effectively recovered. Even if we find one, fortunately we're still far from developing the ability to use ancient DNA to bring long-extinct species back to life.

Enjoying the sight of dinosaurs unleashing havoc and chaos from the comfort of a movie theater is one thing, and truly reviving dinosaurs is quite another. Tampering with nature can have terrifying consequences, as seen in all those movies full of dinosaurs.

So, now let's treat it with a great deal of skepticism, because the Jurassic Park movies are worth watching because they represent good science fiction!