Cloning Dead Monsters
Most of us have seen the Jurassic park (it doesn’t really matter if you have or haven’t) franchise where scientists clone a lot of dangerous dinosaurs from DNA they found and extracted from fossilized
mosquitos. And most of us have thought "wow wouldn’t it be cool if I had a domesticated mini dinosaur for a pet!
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But face it people, do you really think we could bring back extinct creatures back to life? I mean sure we can if the animal recently became extinct and we still had its fresh corpse with its DNA, but what if the animal died like, over a million years ago? If we wanted to clone a T-rex or something, we would have to have access to not just a few but a couple hundred nuclei (stuff in your body we need to clone you) from living cells from a T-rex and just guess how hard it is to find a living cell specimen of a dead species.
For the people who have seen the movie you might be like "what if we could just find half of the DNA in the dinosaur and use amphibian (frogs, newts, and most slimy reptiles) DNA to substitute like in the movie?" Well to do that we need to be able to know the complete DNA formation of the dinosaur first which ultimately means we need the full DNA strands. So it’s basically impossible to clone a dinosaur.
Or is it?
Ok so before we get to the exiting part you may be a little sketchy about what DNA or cloning even means! In not inferring that you don’t know, I’m just saying maybe someone forgot or won’t understand what I'm going to say after this. So DNA is basically the map/recipe that your body uses to make more of your unique cells that make up your body and cloning is when you take that map and use it to make a whole new you (or any other organism we took the DNA out of from) form. Like a complete copy of your physical traits. ). This process usually takes a pretty long time like as long as it took for the original creature to form. It’s kind of like baking. Let’s say we’re baking cookies. The recipe is your
DNA and we use it to make more of the same (somewhat) cookies that the first person made so baking is kind of like cloning.
So now we know more about the process of cloning and DNA let’s move on to the important stuff. Scientists discover a well preserved PREGNANT T-rex that may help bring the dinosaurs back to life (well at least the T-rex)! This is amazing because, well, it’s like winning the lottery with the few coins it took you
days to collect because you are homeless. That ’s how the scientists feel right now. This amazing piece of fossilized bone and flesh was found in Montana and is getting attention from world-wide scientists.
Further testing is needed on this dead creature but after a light scan through the insides of the bones scientists found possible DNA strands in the blood vessels. If they manage to find a untouched strand of DNA we might just get that really cool theme park that might just turn out disastrous. If we manage to perfectly, even semi perfectly clone a T-rex just imagine everything else we could clone! We could probably bring back a couple of species and clone more animals and crops so we would never worry about food! Of course it might have side effects.
In conclusion, this might turn out really cool or might not even work (or the other thing involving people getting chased by big scary lizards that could probably squish a car easily so imagine what would happen to you). So let’s just all hope the scientists succeed in cloning this beast and we can all get tiny pet dinos.
Thanks for reading.
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