Acquiring/Morphing Extinct Creatures

[Phoenix004]

This is partly out of curiosity, but may also have an affect on the plot of my fic at some point. Basically I'm wondering if there is any realistic way of obtaining the DNA of an extinct animal, in order to acquire and morph it.

We know from the series that for some reason, dead animals cannot be acquired. However, we were also told in #18 by Ax that DNA can be acquired from blood alone, hinting at the possibility that if a animal's blood can be obtained while said creature was still alive, it would be possible to morph it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that fossils no longer contain adequate DNA samples, so you couldn't just touch a T-Rex bone and acquire it. Perhaps DNA could be retrieved in a similar fashion to Jurassic Park, by extracting blood from mosquitoes? I don't know enough about how it was supposed to work, but I pretty sure there are scientific reasons why it shouldn't have worked in the movie.

Assuming that isn't possible, how about relatively recent extinct creatures? I remember hearing somewhere that they've recovered well preserved animals such as mammoths, which had been frozen in ice for thousands of years.

[DinosaurNothlit]

Well, this is right up my alley, isn't it?  

It turns out that, no matter how well-preserved something's body is, DNA still degrades over time.  Unless the unique conditions allow the DNA to be preserved as well, even the best-preserved mammoths in ice will have no intact DNA left.  Unfortunately, DNA is best preserved in acidic environments (since DNA is, itself, an acid), which have a tendency not to preserve the body of the animal.  There are a few exceptions, though.  There have been fossils found in peat layers that used to be acidic bogs, so there's some promise for extracting well-preserved DNA.

However, even degraded DNA is not completely useless.  If enough different strands are patched together (and no, I am not talking about using frog DNA, I'm talking about using many different samples of the degraded DNA of the animal you're trying to create), matching segments can be lined up, and the entire DNA sequence could theoretically be determined.  But nobody has yet attempted such a daunting undertaking, and it would probably take years, if not decades, to complete.

And as much as I hate to admit it, but, barring time travel, obtaining the DNA of dinosaurs is probably out of the question.  They have actually obtained DNA from insects in amber (an insect from the time of the dinosaurs, even), but they couldn't find enough intact DNA to even re-create the insect, let alone a dinosaur.  And, although soft tissue and actual cells have been found inside dinosaur bone, no DNA has ever been found.  

EDIT: I did a little more research, and it turns out that some claim to have found dinosaur DNA, but in every case, the results have not been able to be replicated by other scientists, so it's a little sketchy whether they actually did or not.

[Phoenix004]

Yeah I think I saw a documentary once about someone trying to find intact DNA in fossils and thought he'd managed it, but it turned out to be a tiny fragment of the tuna sandwich he had for lunch. Poor guy!

I do have some alternate ideas for how an Animorph could acquire dinosaur DNA, but I would've preferred a more realistic solution. Since one is not available, I will have to explore my other ideas...

Thank you for your help Dino.

[NateSean]

Weeeeelllll. Maybe not realistic as such, but how about a theoretical idea?

They've been tinkering with the concept of on and off switches in DNA for a few years now. If it was somehow possible to tinker with the DNA of, say, a chicken and switch of all of dinosaur traits "on", then theoretically you could reverse evolve the chicken and thusly you would have a dinosaur morph.

Not all of the aspects of this theory are in stone yet because, well, it's still theoretical. But it's out there in real life so you could try to adapt it to your story.

Off topic, I never bought the Mosquito concept.

What were they supposed to do with the blood after they got it? Carefully dissect each Animorph until there was enough blood to acquire it?

[DinosaurNothlit]

Weeeeelllll. Maybe not realistic as such, but how about a theoretical idea?

They've been tinkering with the concept of on and off switches in DNA for a few years now. If it was somehow possible to tinker with the DNA of, say, a chicken and switch of all of dinosaur traits "on", then theoretically you could reverse evolve the chicken and thusly you would have a dinosaur morph.

Not all of the aspects of this theory are in stone yet because, well, it's still theoretical. But it's out there in real life so you could try to adapt it to your story.

I've heard about that idea, too.  The problem there is, as one scientist put it, you don't really have a real dinosaur but a collection of dinosaur parts.  You'd almost need actual dinosaur DNA just to figure out how to make chicken DNA behave like dinosaur DNA.

The other problem being, even if you could find all the right parts to put together a dinosaur, you could only get one particular species of dinosaur from the mix; that being whatever dinosaur chickens directly evolved from (which would probably be some kind of compsognathus-like creature or early velociraptor ancestor).  You would have no way of getting a T-rex or a Triceratops, because they wouldn't exist in the chicken's evolutionary lineage.

Man, I'm just raining on everybody's parade, aren't I?

[Myitt]

I really don't think this would be possible, because the animal is already dead in the case of fossils, hair or preserved tissue (Karen Chin FTW!)...and in the case of blood, even if blood could be extracted from a mosquito, the DNA would be way too fragmentary.

That being said, if I could morph into something extinct, it'd probably be



...this