Board Thread:Fossil Fuels/@comment-3213993-20140925072347

George M. Church is recreating a woolly mammoth-like animal at Harvard by inserting genes for essential traits like hair and cold resistance into Asian elephant cells. He could have an embryo ready for an Asian elephant surrogate mother as early as 2017.

But that is not the focus of this. The focus of this post is that Church is not synthesizing an entire mammoth genome, which is not currently possible (and will likely always be impractical). He is taking the genome of the mammoth's modern relative and inserting key genes in. This is similar to what Henry Wu did in the novels and films.

Using a bird (most likely chicken) genome, we could do the same for dinosaurs. A revolutionary device that edits genomes in short periods of time could help with this. Admittedly, Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor are not as close to birds as a mammoth is to an Asian elephant. And we will never have an entire non-avian dinosaur genome. At the most, we will have small fragments of DNA from fossil remains, and pieces of DNA coding for dinosaur protein sequences we know of. Most of the genes used would be mutant/atavistic genes ala chickenosaurus, or synthetic genes. This basically means a recreated Tyrannosaurus, for example, would be to Tyrannosaurus what a thylacine is to a wolf. 