In the classical understanding, as in "Jurassic Park", humanity is unlikely to ever resurrect dinosaurs. The main and, seemingly, insurmountable problem is the complete degradation of DNA. The DNA molecule has a half-life of about 521 years, and even in ideal storage conditions, it becomes completely unreadable after about 1.5 million years. Dinosaurs, however, went extinct 66 million years ago, so all their genetic material has long since been transformed into a useless mixture of chemical compounds. The remains of soft tissues or collagen fragments discovered by scientists today are no more than fossilized shadows of past life, containing no genetic code.

But even if we imagine the impossible and assume that the full genome of a dinosaur could be synthesized artificially, we would encounter problems of a different order. The development of an embryo requires not only genes but also complex epigenetic regulation — instructions on when and how these genes should be activated in the growth process, and this information has been lost with the DNA itself. Moreover, there is no suitable surrogate mother and egg: the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds, have eggs with an entirely different internal structure. The immune system of the newly born creature would be completely defenseless against modern bacteria and viruses that have evolved for tens of millions of years.

However, there is a more realistic and already being developed path that does not lead to resurrection, but to the creation of a kind of chimera. The famous paleontologist Jack Horner and a group of other scientists are promoting the idea of a "chicken-dinosaur," or Chickensaurus. They are not trying to find ancient DNA, but go in the opposite direction: in the genome of modern birds, direct descendants of dinosaurs, ancient genes sleep that are responsible for the characteristics of ancestors. With the help of genetic editing, these atavistic programs can be awakened. In laboratory experiments on chicken embryos, it has already been possible to grow buds of teeth instead of parts of the beak, form a face resembling that of a velociraptor, and even find mechanisms that will allow growing a long tail instead of a reduced bird tail in the future. The appearance of the first creature with a full set of external dinosaur characteristics, according to the predictions of the researchers themselves, is a prospect for the next 20–50 years. But this will not be a resurrected velociraptor, but a deeply modified chicken, a bird with activated traits of a distant ancestor.

The true resurrection is happening in another direction — with recently extinct species whose cells and DNA have been preserved. The first and only successful experience so far is the birth in 2003 of a cloned Pyrenean ibex from frozen cells, although the animal lived for only a few minutes. Today, the biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences is working on reviving the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian wolf, or thylacin. Their goal is not an ideal copy, but a sustainable hybrid with the closest living relative. A mammothphant based on the Asian elephant is expected to be obtained by the end of this decade, and the thylacin by 10–15 years. These projects prove that "resurrection" of extinct animals is possible, but only under the condition of preserving a sufficient amount of their genetic material, which forever closes the path to the Jurassic period and opens the way to the Chicken Park period, inhabited by amazing creatures from flesh, feathers, and scientific imagination.

Permanent link to this publication: