Quote Originally Posted by English assassin
OI, it's the I never knew that thread not the offbeat conspiracy theory thread.

The planet Saturn is less dense than water. If you put it in a (very large) bowl of water it would float.
Nice, i never knew that

As this is the thread for it...I'd like to put forth an answer to the age old question put forth by Jurassic Park.

Can You really make a new Dinosaur from old DNA?

This theory was put forth, as i said earlier, by the book Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and the later film directed by Speilberg. In the real world no dinosaur DNA has ever been extracted. there was some suggestion that some had been found in the past (providing the basis for Crichton's book) but later studies showed it to be contamination on the bones.
After 66 million years, which is how long the dinosaurs have been extinct, any DNA that might be found would probably be extremely degreaded, and to be able to produce a healthy organism you have to have all the genes in its genome. Genomes fro advanced creatures tend to be in the order of billions of base-pairs, and the chanc of extracting more than a few tens or hundreds of bases from any very old DNA that remains is just about zero. Even if we manage to find lots of DNA there is a large chance that most of it will be junk (in higher animals, such as elephants, about 90% plus of the geneome is non-coding DNA). So there isn't really any chance of being able to bring dinosaurs back to life.
I the book and film Jurassic Park, the DNA was transmitted via a blood-sucking insect which had become trapped in amber. It was a clever bit of story-telling by Michael Crichton, but the molecules which carry the blueprint of all life forms are immensely long and complicated. The Chances of being able to find even a few broken fragments of DNA of animals that died and became fossilized more than 66 million years ago is very remote.


That was also for people who read the "Mammoth DNA" thread in the backroom ages ago