You Think They’ll Have that on the Tour?

I’m not advocating making a theme park or breeding anything that dines on people–just recreating some pterodactyls, and maybe a brontosaurus or a stegosaurus. Maybe a triceratops, if we want to get fancy. In addition to dinosaurs, I’ve always wanted to see a woolly mammoth and, because they look as goofy as their name suggests, a dodo bird.

In order for Crichton’s fictitious scenario to become reality, a few things have to be scientifically mastered. First, we have to be able to extract viable DNA from fossils, carcasses, or remains, and secondly, we have to be able to replicate that DNA. As plausible as the idea sounds in the book, mosquitoes in amber won’t do the trick.

DNA’s viability after death depends on the type of DNA, as well as its storage environment. Certain species have particularly fragile DNA, and some are more susceptible to environmental factors that contribute to the cultivation of bacteria, fungi, and other chemical reactions that break down DNA. Cool and dry storage conditions help DNA maintain transferability, and studies have shown that DNA up to 100,000 years old can be extracted from fossils provided that the environment is ideal.

Neanderthals unearthed in Germany, Russia, and Italy, roughly 20,000-30,000 years old, have all yielded DNA that scientists were able to sequence. Among other things, scientists discovered that Neanderthal and humans are genetically quite distinct. I think someone has already figured out how to clone these creatures:

DNA has also been recovered from woolly mammoths, which became extinct around the end of the Pleistocene era, about 10,000 years ago. In the last few years, scientists at Penn State were able to use hair samples to sequence the genome of the woolly mammoth—a first for extinct species. However, recreating the species is a much more difficult task because cloning requires a nucleus with intact DNA. Once a cell dies, DNA ceases to be viable for cloning. Ideally, researchers hope to find frozen sperm or a pregnant mammoth carcass, though muscle, skin, or tissue could house viable DNA. No such sample has been found yet, though in May 2007, a Russian reindeer herder found a nearly perfectly preserved carcass of a baby mammoth, which he sold for food and snowmobiles; some reports indicate that some hungry sled dogs used the specimen as a chew toy before the herder handed it over.

The cloning process would involve putting a genetically viable mammoth nucleus into an elephant egg stripped of its DNA; scientists would fertilize the DNA-less elephant egg with the mammoth DNA and then try to catalyze mitosis via electric current. The other option is breeding–if researchers found frozen mammoth sperm with intact DNA, they could inject it into an elephant egg in a process not terribly different than in vitro fertilization for humans. Elephants seem to be the most logical choice for cross-breeding; their genetic composition is somewhere between 98 and 99% the same as the woolly mammoth. Earlier this year, scientists from Kyoto University began a project to fertilize the egg cells of an African elephant with mammoth DNA . Their goal is to produce a baby elemoths or mamephants in the next six years.

The closest real-world replica of Crichton’s book is a result of a decade’s worth of work by a team of Russian and Japanese scientists who retrieve DNA from extinct creatures and cross-breed it with their closest living counterparts. “Pleistocene Park” is currently home to Yakutian horses, reindeer, elk, moos, snow sheep, and musk ox, and they recently introduced the wood bison, a close relative of the extinct steppe bison. Anyone already planning a trip to Siberia should make a stop here.

Seeing as how dinosaurs ruled the earth somewhere between 65 and 225 million years ago, it’s almost certainly impossible (leaving just a bit of wiggle room for chaos theory) that any of their DNA has survived. But that won’t stop us from trying. Bringing back an extinct species is akin to bringing back the dead, but on a bigger scale. It’s something gods might do. It also provides a certain sense of comfort–if we eradicate a species from this earth either by destroying its home, its food, or the creatures themselves, there’s the chance we could undo the mistake (or at least try).

While dinosaurs will live in on fiction only, I do predict that in the next 25 years, the woolly mammoth will become the tundra’s greatest source of tourist revenue and its biggest consumer of hair care products.