Hey there, welcome to Playnoggin.
I’m Julian, your brain’s player two.
Who among us doesn’t love dinosaurs?
I’m seriously asking, because if you don’t
like dinosaurs we can’t be friends.
Nothing captures our childhood imagination
like a tyrannosaurus, or a brontosaurus, or
a stegosaurus, or any of the million other
‘o-sauruses you had memorized when you were
five.
The good people at Studio Wildcard knew this,
and they decided the responsible thing to
do was let you keep them as pets in their
game ARK: Survival Evolved.
The game’s premise is pretty much what it
says on the tin.
You have to survive on a mysterious island
called ARK.
The island is populated by, you guessed it,
dinosaurs, but why stop there?
Why not throw in some woolly mammoths and
saber-toothed tigers?
Heck, you can come too, dodo bird.
All the world’s extinct species seem to
end up on ARK.
Wait, should we be worried humans are here?
Is that some subtle commentary, Studio Wildcard?
The game had been in early access since the
mesozoic era but it finally released in summer
of 2017, and now we all can experience the
joy of having a faithful companion tyrannosaurus.
I named mine Rex.
But for some of us, fossils and movies and
video games just aren’t enough.
We still dream of the real thing.
We want to hand feed woolly mammoths at the
zoo, or have a passenger pigeon poop on our
windshield.
We want to visit a park of some kind with
dinosaurs from the cretaceous, triassic, and
uh….
Dang it I can never remember the third one.
The point is, we want to see these extinct
creatures we’ve heard so much about, up
close and in the flesh.
Could the wondrous powers of science make
that possible?
We’ve actually already brought a species
back from extinction.
It wasn’t anything as magnificent as a triceratops
or as magical as a liopleurodon.
It was a pyrenean ibex, a species of goat
that lived in the mountains in northern Spain.
The very last one died in the year 2000 when
it was crushed by a falling tree.
Scientists were prepared for just such an
occasion, and had saved samples of the ibex’s
DNA.
In 2002 they injected specially prepared goat
eggs with the ibex’s DNA and gave it a little
jolt of electricity to kick start life.
Once the embryos were dividing, they were
implanted into surrogate mother goats.
Almost all the pregnancies failed, except
one.
In July of 2003 a clone of the extinct pyrenean
ibex was born, resurrecting a species for
the first time ever.
Seven minutes later the goat died, making
history again as the first species to go extinct
twice.
While existence didn’t work out for the
pyrenean ibex, it showed that de-extinction
was possible.
You just need three things: DNA, an egg, and
a birthing mother.
That means for some of the species we see
in ARK, there actually is a chance to bring
them back.
One species that scientists are working to
resurrect is the woolly mammoth.
At this very moment there are cells that have
mammoth DNA living in a petri dish at Harvard.
Mammoths died out in the relatively recent
past.
While most of them went from tusk to dust
10,000 years ago, a small population survived
on an island in the arctic ocean until about
1650 BC.
For context, the pyramids of Giza were built
about 1,000 years before that, so woolly mammoths
and Egyptian pyramids co-existed at one point.
As a bonus, since woolly mammoths lived in
colder regions, many of them have been preserved
in ice like giant furry popsicles.
With their soft tissue in tact, scientists
have been able to recover substantial chunks
of DNA.
They haven’t gotten one complete genome
though.
DNA breaks down over time as its exposed to
enzymes, oxygen, water, and UV radiation.
The more time that goes by the more fragmented
DNA becomes, so even when scientists uncover
a 40,000 year old specimen that looks perfectly
preserved, they still have to piece together
it’s DNA.
And woolly mammoth DNA is over 5 billion base
p airs long.
There might be a shortcut though.
Woolly mammoths do have a close living relative,
the asian elephant.
So rather than trying to rebuild the entire
genome, scientists can use gene editing techniques
to splice some mammal mutations into elephant
DNA.
Then they could just artificially inseminate
an asian elephant with their hybrid mammophant
and watch her confusion when she gives birth
to a really fuzzy kid.
De-extincting woolly mammoths would be pretty
amazing.
I mean if someone got me a mammoth for my
birthday I wouldn’t be mad about it.
But c’mon, scientists, you know what we
really want.
Give us the dinosaurs.
Now obviously there’s a glaring flaw trying
to create little baby raptors the way we’d
make mammoths.
Most reptiles don’t give birth to live young,
so the artificial insemination approach is
out.
That might be a good thing, since developing
embryos need to receive hormone signals from
the mother at specific times, so it might
be simpler to just use an egg.
But then where does the egg come from?
The only living relatives of dinosaurs are
birds, which are clearly a lot more different
from dinosaurs than elephants are from mammoths.
And even then birds aren’t related to just
any dinosaurs, but specifically to theropods
like the T-rex.
So if you wanted something else, like a stegosaurus,
you’d have to make the DNA entirely from
scratch.
Amazingly, we have cloned organisms from synthesized
DNA alone!
Scientists have created bacteria DNA and transplanted
it into another bacterium to create a new
living cell.
It’s impressive, but the DNA they synthesized
was only a million base pairs long, pretty
short as DNA goes.
Plus bacteria don’t keep their DNA in a
nucleus, which makes transplanting it into
an empty cell easier.
Scientists are now working on creating synthetic
yeast cells, which have a nucleus, and they’re
probably a couple of years from figuring that
out.
We’re still a long long way from making
multicellular organisms like frogs or dogs
or dinosaurs.
But even if the technology existed to put
dino DNA inside an empty cell and nurture
it until it was an adorable killing machine,
there’s still one massive problem.
We have no idea what dinosaur DNA looks like,
because there’s absolutely none left on
earth.
Those dinosaur bones you see in museums don’t
have any DNA, because they’re not actually
bones, but mineral deposits that were made
over millions of years as the bones decayed
and water seeped in.
They’re more like stone than bone, no DNA
there.
And there’s no chance of a mosquito preserved
in amber holding on to a drop of DNA, because
DNA decays.
Scientists have calculated that even under
the very best conditions, a strand of DNA
would be completely broken apart after 6.8
million years.
Since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million
years ago, there’s no chance of any DNA
surviving today.
No two base pairs would be in tact, it would
be utterly useless.
So we have no starting point.
We have no idea how to make dinosaur DNA.
Maybe after years of work we could cobble
together something that looks like a dinosaur,
but even then we still disagree on some fundamentals
of what dinosaurs were like.
Did the T-rex have scales or feathers or some
mix of both?
Was it a fearsome hunter or an overgrown scavenger?
We just don’t know, so whatever creature
we create would be our best guess, but it
wouldn’t be exactly like the real thing.
Plus we’ve been so preoccupied with whether
or not we could we didn’t stop to think
if we should.
Based on my experience getting a pet T-rex
in ARK: survival evolved I have to say, hell
yeah we should!
Hey thanks for watching, don’t forget to
click subscribe because these videos aren’t
going extinct.
Dinosaurs came in all kinds of crazy shapes
but they’re nothing compared to the creatures
that live in the sea.
To find out why the ocean makes fish look
weird check out our video on subnautica here.
