• Question from:Henry tickle

is it possible to breed 2 animals from today to create animals of the past i think you could but just possibly with some gene splicing

  • University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
  • Posts: 307

I'm going to put on my pedant hat, so be warned!

The short answer is no, but you might be able to get superficially close.

Using breeding, or gene transfer technology you can, in principle, develop an animal which very closely resembles another. However, regardless of how closely that ressemblance gets, it will not be the same animal.

This can be illustrated by the many examples of convergent evolution, where different species evolve into the same niche (at different times!) and so look superficially similar. But if you look at all past the few similarities,  they quickly emerge as clearly distinct with their separate evolutionary origins.

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  • University of Bristol
  • Posts: 2,464

And just to add - we have no dinosaur DNA that is intact and there is no likelihood any time soon we will find a way of obtaining that. Thus the idea that we can use gene splicing is a non-starter.