Mailund on the Internet

Today is a holiday (in Denmark at least), so I will allow myself to be a bit unscientific.

In Jurassic Park they extract dinosaur DNA from insects found in amber. At least in the movie, I read the book several years ago and don’t remember if it was the same there — I seem to recall they also spliced it with DNA from other animals there, though. Anyway, I doubt this is something we would ever be able to do, but if we wanted to build a jurassic park, could we reconstruct dino DNA? Based on present day species, would we ever be able to reconstruct the DNA of dinos?

Not specific species, obviously. We would need enough present day species branching off all the inner edges in the extinct dino phylogeny, and we do not have species for that, but could we infer a kind of dino based on birds, reptiles and whatnot?

Here’s an interesting story: Insect Attack May Have Finished Off Dinosaurs.

Apparently, a lot of disease carrying insects appeared at the time of the dinosaur mass extinction. If the dinosaurs’ immune system was not up to the task of defending the host against this, that might be what killed them all off.

“We can’t say for certain that insects are the smoking gun, but we believe they were an extremely significant force in the decline of the dinosaurs,” Poinar said. “Our research with amber shows that there were evolving, disease-carrying vectors in the Cretaceous, and that at least some of the pathogens they carried infected reptiles. This clearly fills in some gaps regarding dinosaur extinctions.”

Personally, I know nothing about dinos and cannot judge if this is a reasonable theory or not, but I did find it an interesting read.