Curiosity killed the cat. They say satisfaction brought it back, but I’m pretty sure that if scientists manage to clone a bunch of raptors like everyone hopes, there won’t be much of us left by the year 3000.
Sure, bringing back the dinosaurs seems like a pretty cool idea on the surface. For one, the curiosity of dino-enthusiasts would finally be satisfied, since we really don’t know jack about these creatures as they were in life, despite years and years of attempting to piece together scraps of evidence left behind after their extinction. Not only that, but dinosaurs are freaking awesome. Why not bring them back?
Well, I’ll tell you why not. Dinosaurs can be big, they can be fierce, and when given the chance, they will kill you. I’ve heard plenty of curious cats shrug off that last little detail, putting all their faith in large, heavily-secured labs located on a remote island somewhere meant to keep these beasts away from the general public. But I always wonder, haven’t any of them seen “Jurassic Park”? For me at least, that movie brought up more than enough reasons why not to bring back the dinosaurs.
Besides, is the idea of bringing back dinosaurs even possible? In short, no. Not only do scientists not have enough DNA to clone dinosaurs, but even if they did, the world is a very different place now. As Dino Don said on scholastic.com, “Life wouldn’t be so good for the dinosaurs now either – different weather, different plants, even different air.” Therefore, a dinosaur probably couldn’t even survive on our planet as it is today unless scientists figured out how to address the problem somehow by, say, recreating their habitats in a lab somewhere.
At the same time, successfully bringing back other extinct animals might be a possibility in the near future, which (depending on the animal) might not be such a bad idea. According to National Geographic, scientists have apparently brought back a bucardo (or ‘Pyrenean ibex’), an animal that went extinct in 2000, using a frozen skin sample in 2003. The clone died minutes after birth, but the fact that they could do it at all is still a pretty big deal.
Still, dino-enthusiasts shouldn’t get too excited. Senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. David Wildt told National Geographic that “the public should not leap to the conclusion that we are on the edge of cloning woolly mammoths or dinosaurs. Even if such embryos could be constructed, there are no appropriate surrogate mothers for long-dead species.”
That’s not the end of it, however, as further digging into the subject brought up another terrifying scientific discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently. As ABC reported, scientists from UW-Madison and Manchester, United Kingdom were attempting to study how birds evolved from “flying, nonavian reptiles to the feathered creatures we now know” when they accidentally grew chickens with teeth. Yes, teeth. ABC even went as far as to say they were saber-like, which is a really terrifying thought. Despite this only happening in the embryo (since the saber-tooth chickens never hatched), it’s still a major stride in the name of science in the sense that it’s now very possible to create these clucking nightmares in the first place.
After overseeing the project, John Fallon of the University of Wisconsin told ABC, “These results provide clear evidence that these chickens possess the memory of the past; they have retained the ability to make teeth, under certain conditions. What I am describing is evolution.”
Ask any chicken farmer and they’ll tell you the same thing; grab the shotgun and prepare yourself, America, as the Midwest’s most annoying, feisty, and unnecessarily bitter little birds are now evolving backwards. Good luck to us all.
