The resurrection of extinct species is one which many scientists are interested in. There are even depositories of genetic material gathered from animals which have went or are going extinct and the holy grail of this resurrection would be the resurrection of dinosaurs and thanks to the talent of Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg the idea seems feasible but is it really possible to bring back a species which went extinct so long ago back?
In this classic movie scientists found a mosquito trapped in amber which had the blood of a dinosaurs and from this they were able to create a plethora of different dinosaurs. An excellent set up for a movie and it sounds scientifically plausible but sadly many of the steps in this process are flawed.
Let us assume that at some point in the near future that scientists make enough improvements in current cloning technology that they are able to begin to bring species back from extinction, meaning that the technology exists to create dinosaurs if we had the correct DNA. We do not currently have this DNA, and we are unlikely to get it. Even in laboratory situations where scientist work day and night to maintain conditions which retard the process of the destruction of DNA it is difficult to maintain truly viable DNA for long periods of time. There is currently a race to create cloning technology fast enough to save some of the species who's genetic material we have gathered and saved. This race was sadly lost long ago in the case of Dinosaur DNA and it is unlikely to change in the near future.
The next question set up by the question of cloning DNA is that of a variety of species. If we were able to gather the DNA of a dinosaur would we then have the genetic knowledge to clone a hundred other species of dinosaurs? I wish we would because while dinosaurs are extinct many birds have strong genetic connections to the dinosaurs and the DNA of birds is far easier to get than that of animals which died out millions of years ago but the truth is that even with the DNA of one species of dinosaur you would need to genetically engineer it to create the others. This level of genetic engineering is currently unavailable and even if we achieve it at some point it would be difficult to consider this cloning unless we had something to match the DNA against. A genetically altered bird that looked like a dinosaur would be fun to look at but genetically it would almost certainly not be a dinosaur.
Finally there is the question of if dinosaurs could live in our world at all. The world of the dinosaurs was far warmer, wetter and open than ours as well as having more oxygen in the atmosphere. It is unlikely, or possible impossible for, these creatures to survive in our modern biosphere.
Perhaps some day in the future we will have the ability to bring back species and perhaps we will even be able to genetically manipulate DNA well enough to create animals which look like dinosaur but without access to the original DNA and considerable advancements in current technologies we will not have cloned Dinosaurs.
