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Jihadin wrote:
Are you mentally able and physicaly fit to even try it?

Physically sure. Not sure about what you mean by mentally able. I've hunted things that hunt you back before, it that's what you mean. I also have a basic knowledge of theropod anatomy from back when my hobby was paleobiology rather then 40k. The real question is: are they edible? Biochemistry tends to be poorly recorded in the fossil record outside things like tar pits and Siberian tundras. (Guarding archeological and paleontological digs can be educational. Particularly when someone digs up a disease that hasn't been seen in a century and you spend two months being poked and prodded)

Thinking same muscle tissue as all of us and animals. Question is what goes good with the meat. Ketchup, A1, or BBQ. We would already know they like rare...bloody rare

Jihadin wrote:Thinking same muscle tissue as all of us and animals. Question is what goes good with the meat. Ketchup, A1, or BBQ. We would already know they like rare...bloody rare

Yeah, but that doesn't mean much. Fugu has similar tissues to non poisonous puffers, but it doesn't mean you can't die from it. If they try reverse engineering it from birds, it's probably safe to eat, but I'd want to see a tox report first.

Guess they have to test it on a victi....eerrrrr volunteer

Jihadin wrote:Guess they have to test it on a victi....eerrrrr volunteer

Volunteer like 'I'll do it Sir!' or volunteer like 'Private, I have a job for you....'

Edit: and sadly, I immediately thought of three potential volunteers who'd happily try it.

Problem is DNA deteriorates quickly enough that even the DNA extracted form frozen mammoths is no good.

A boy can dream though.



Sigh...

Volunteer like 'I'll do it Sir!' or volunteer like 'Private, I have a job for you....'

LOL who says we have to tell the individual. Far as the individual know...its a steak from a cow.....

Ma55ter_fett wrote:Problem is DNA deteriorates quickly enough that even the DNA extracted form frozen mammoths is no good.

Actually dna has been extracted and sequenced from frozen mammoths and a Russian team has been working to clone it. Back in 2008 the Japanese developed a technique to extract and sequence DNA from frozen specimens. Granted, they only used subjects frozen about 20 years, but...

While an intact strand has never been found, fragmentary DNA from dinosaurs has been found in the past.

Jihadin wrote:
LOL who says we have to tell the individual. Far as the individual know...its a steak from a cow.....

I'm willing to bet it would have a texture closer to chicken. Being that the two are related. Besides, I'd like to tell them what they're dealing with before getting them killed.

This is the sort of thing that gives the US Military a bad rep. 'March up to that nuclear blast crater, son, and march back and tell me the numbers this here box showed.'

I didn't even have to click on the link to know this idea would have been proposed from one of the people that made their fortune in mining. And sure enough it was Clive Palmer claiming this nonsense.

Our country is full of these idiots now, by the way. You know how people used to laugh about those flying rodent gak crazy oil shieks who would try and buy all the silver in the world or something just as stupid? Well that's Australia now.

sebster wrote:I didn't even have to click on the link to know this idea would have been proposed from one of the people that made their fortune in mining. And sure enough it was Clive Palmer claiming this nonsense.

Our country is full of these idiots now, by the way. You know how people used to laugh about those flying rodent gak crazy oil shieks who would try and buy all the silver in the world or something just as stupid? Well that's Australia now.

I'd rather have billionaires buying dinosaurs the politicians though

Jihadin wrote:LOL who says we have to tell the individual. Far as the individual know...its a steak from a cow.....

Sign me up. I wouldn't care that its dino meat. Sure it might be infested with prehistoric parasites or something but i'd do it just so i was able to claim i was the first person to eat a dinosaur.

Grakmar wrote:

Jihadin wrote:Looks like he's creating modern dinosaurs then.....would that improve the veloceraptor....better be a deep deep dddeeeeeeeppppp pit

Velociraptors weren't very big.

6 feet long (although most of that is tail), but only 1 and a half feet tall, and weighing 30 lbs. So, it's almost the same size as my Beagle, it his tail grew another few feet.

Dienonychus has been effectively renamed already though.

I dont want Velociraptors, I want Allosaurs, minimum.

Orlanth wrote:I dont want Velociraptors, I want Allosaurs, minimum.

Ok, do you want a Nazi engineered super babe to kill your Allosaur as well?

This thread has been disappointing.

Never trust spielberg.

BaronIveagh wrote:

Orlanth wrote:I dont want Velociraptors, I want Allosaurs, minimum.

Ok, do you want a Nazi engineered super babe to kill your Allosaur as well?

No. Seeing as its a genetic project I want at least three, to lead my minions into battle; plus other unmentioned secondary functions.
I am still having the allosaurs, as transportation with teeth.

Orlanth wrote:
No. Seeing as its a genetic project I want at least three, to lead my minions into battle; plus other unmentioned secondary functions.
I am still having the allosaurs, as transportation with teeth.

Ah, something more like this is your speed, then:

That thing climbs tree Baron?

Jihadin wrote:That thing climbs tree Baron?

The velociraptor? Yeah, don't see why it couldn't. Dunno about regular hunting practices. The fantasy hardware tyrannosaur? Probably not, but why would it need to, it's fifteen foot at the hip and forty feet long.

This seems like a natural use for those 13 foot tall mechs they're selling in Japan. Your tour boat lets a half dozen mechs off at a special harbor, then you go on a nice safari to engage in robotic fisticuffs with the horribly mutated Ostrich-o-saurus.

Chicken seems like way too much work- start with the bigger, more aggressive flightless birds.

BaronIveagh wrote:

Ma55ter_fett wrote:Problem is DNA deteriorates quickly enough that even the DNA extracted form frozen mammoths is no good.

Actually dna has been extracted and sequenced from frozen mammoths and a Russian team has been working to clone it. Back in 2008 the Japanese developed a technique to extract and sequence DNA from frozen specimens. Granted, they only used subjects frozen about 20 years, but...

While an intact strand has never been found, fragmentary DNA from dinosaurs has been found in the past.

Fragments aren't much good though, you don't have a complete genome, you don't know what or how much is missing, you don't know if the fragments have deteriorated over time altering their code, you can't guess as to their arrangement in the genome. Even if they had all the genome they'd have to assemble it into working chromosomes, and DNA isn't like Lego. The way they 'filled the gaps' with bird/frog DNA in Jurassic park is just a fiction. How can you fill gaps when you don't know what they should be? The practical problems in what is being described are ridiculous to anyone familiar with a genetics laboratory, which is a shame really because I'd like to see dinosaurs in the flesh, but it's not remotely near reality.

Mammoths is an interesting one because they are far more recent than Dinosaurs, they have frozen tissue. Should they have a complete genome (and that's quite a leap at this point) then you could in theory do it, but the rejection rate of cross-species surrogates is high, and the closest relative to a Mammoth is an elephant, and they aren't *that* close. It would be easier if elephants weren't endangered in general and didn't have a two year gestation period, it means there aren't just heaps of them lying around to experiment with trying to make a single viable Mammoth.

I believe they do have complete Mammoth DNA. Even right now they're working on cloning it.

If they didn't have complete DNA I'm sure they wouldn't even attempt it. You don't need to map the Genome to clone something.


And Elephants arn't so rare that they can't use them as surrogates. There are enough captive elephants to spare. Asian Elephants will probably be used as opposed to African ones. More tractable and certaintly not endangered, considering they are used as beasts of burden in India in the place of heavy machinery like tractors would be used in Logging.

Howard A Treesong wrote:

Fragments aren't much good though, you don't have a complete genome, you don't know what or how much is missing, you don't know if the fragments have deteriorated over time altering their code, you can't guess as to their arrangement in the genome. Even if they had all the genome they'd have to assemble it into working chromosomes, and DNA isn't like Lego. The way they 'filled the gaps' with bird/frog DNA in Jurassic park is just a fiction. How can you fill gaps when you don't know what they should be? The practical problems in what is being described are ridiculous to anyone familiar with a genetics laboratory, which is a shame really because I'd like to see dinosaurs in the flesh, but it's not remotely near reality.

In principal you can look at living relatives and make a educated guess about the sequence. Mass spectrometry analysis of tyrannosaur collagen showed it to be very similar to...well, the chicken. Granted, it's useless for cloning, but in the unlikely event that a more complete strand can be found (dinosaur soft tissues have been found preserved) it can be used as a basis to fill in the holes.

True, but the chance that only the parts you can fill in with chicken are missing is going to be very slim. If even one part is wrong, you're going to fail.

Actually, dino fossils can be demineralized. It's a long shot to find intact DNA, but it's possible.
Also, the first clones will probably be as small and similar to modern animals as possible, maybe a Compsognathus with a surrogate chicken or turkey mother.

BaronIveagh wrote:
In principal you can look at living relatives and make a educated guess about the sequence. Mass spectrometry analysis of tyrannosaur collagen showed it to be very similar to...well, the chicken. Granted, it's useless for cloning, but in the unlikely event that a more complete strand can be found (dinosaur soft tissues have been found preserved) it can be used as a basis to fill in the holes.

You've got to be quite careful about doing that between closely related living species, they can be very different. Comparisons of the differences between two well mapped DNA samples can tell you things about the shared heredity of two species. But to use one DNA sample as a guide to guess the unknown content of another, that doesn't really work beyond speculation. Even if you correctly guess the DNA content of the gaps, you don't know if it is actively coded or what level of regulation the sequence operates under, so you can't just go plugging bits from other organisms in, you'll get something rather odd out the other end, if it can even live.

Birds are living relatives, but they are far removed from their dinosaur ancestors. You would be very hard pressed to take two closely related modern bird species and correctly determine which sequences to substitute from one into another (if one species had unknown gaps you were trying to fill using a donor). You could certainly guess as to the rough content of certain sections of the genome. But trying to fill it? If the substituted sequence didn't match the gap exactly you likely won't get something viable out the other end, or the results would be erratic, and the animal wouldn't really seem like a proper healthy example of what you were aiming for.

the biggest problem with cloning is the following:

when they successfuly cloned dolly, they also successfully copied her age. I'm not sure of the rest of the information there, but not knowing in advance whether the test subject is going to be of a sufficient age for normal reproduction, or if we're going to have a sufficiently large and stable gene pool to warrant reproduction, we are going to have big problems with achieving success.

Success via reverse engineering and close study of embrionic eggs is probably our best bet for trying to find a "dinosaur".

Trick is, we never will get back to those dinos that died out unless we magictastically succeed with the DNA harvesting thing for that species. That genetic legacy died out, and what we have alive now is the genetic legacy of those things that DID survive, and with human activity slaughtering off many other birds and reptiles that may have been useful for this....... wellllllll.... I'm not confident this is something we can do unless we do it from scratch and build that DNA ourselves.

Well, that can be mitigated if you have DNA strands from 2 seperate individuals. You essentially create an artificial embryo the exact same way it would be created naturally. One chromosome from each of the parents.

Somehow, that seems to reset the genetic "age" of the DNA. Once you have a strand from an individual that is, agewise, shortly after conception you will have a viable DNA source.


Thats why the Mammoth people are using DNA from young mammoths, like that whole calf they found in the melting permafrost. A clone of that mammoth wouldn't have age issues like Dolly did.

It's not just about mixing material from different parents to create a hybrid embryo, you're still introducing somatic cell material into an egg and expecting it to grow.

The 'age reset' I think actually occurs when gametes are generated in a living organism. The process to produce haploid sex cells is different in many ways to that of duplicating somatic cells, and that's where the reset occurs. Simply transferring genomic material into an embryo won't replicate this.

For example, in somatic cells you have things such as telomeric shortening, which results in the ends of the chromosomes being eroded after many cycles of replication. This means that your DNA in body cells can't replicate and divide infinitely even if you don't die of ill health. When gametes are formed, there are processes that occur to cap the telomeres to reset them for another lifetime. I also assume there are Epigenetic effects naturally resulting from advancing age which carry over into embryos made by just putting the DNA from an adult into them, you're not really starting with DNA specifically prepared to start an animal from the age of zero.

Which is why it helps if the animal thats the source is naturally at a young age. The Mammoth project is being done with young mammoths so is more likely to succed.

Any animals created like this may still suffer the ill effects of the cloning process, but at the very least it wouldn't be until they were much older. At the very least they will be able to reproduce naturally before that happens. And at that point there will be no need for cloning anymore.

You know, I was going to make a remark about how Jurassic Park was supposed to be a cautionary tale and that this attempt throws everything it has to say right out of the window. But honestly, I don't really care because I want some fething dinosaurs!




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Phanatik wrote:This thread has been disappointing.

Never trust spielberg.