[shreyansj]

Honest question - what has stopped us from bringing extinct dinosaurs back to life? Which variable in the equation is unsolved?

[eru]

For one, we don't have their DNA.

See eg https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosa...

[TeMPOraL]

On top of what the article says, even if we had pristine dinosaur DNA, the way we clone things is through a living host - so whatever we'd clone would be half-dinosaur, half-cow, or half-whatever animal volunteered a womb/egg.

[simcop2387]

Not necessarily half. There'd definitely be some sharing but when we clone things we replace the genome in the egg that's used. That said it'll share mitochondrial and other things during development

[devnonymous]

I get what you're saying but it would more likely be half-Dino, half-chicken :-)

As an aside though, wasn't there a place to reintroduce wooly mammoths? Wonder what happened to that.

[TheBigSalad]

Frogs my bro

[thdrdt]

The youngest dinosaur fossil found is estimated to be 65 million years old.

The oldest DNA sample is estimated to be 800,000 years old.

So we simply don't have DNA from a dinosaur.

[simcop2387]

DNA. There's no recoverable DNA to be discovered after that long, pretty much regardless of how it might have been preserved.

[crtasm]

On this topic, I really enjoy talks from Jack Horner.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fr...