Thread:Jurassic Park Treasury/@comment-11047508-20130610075940/@comment-3213993-20130628052332

I now have a few criticisms of your views on DNA decay.

1. You say that if Allentoft's model was right, there shouldn't have been proteins in the B-Rex fossil. This is not true. RNA, DNA and proteins are all essential for life, but they have very different decay rates. If I recall correctly, RNA is destroyed almost immediately after cell death, while many authors indeed believe that proteins can last much longer than DNA in fossils. Why should the presence of proteins in dinosaur fossils change how long DNA lasts? It's like saying that milk can last longer than a few weeks or months because canned food can last for years.

2. You say that DNA could last longer in amber than bones because Allentoft only studied decay in bones. However, from what I've heard, DNA decay should be no different in any preservational method because the DNA half-life has a key word. Half-life. Uranium has a half-life, and whether the uranium is in the sandstone, in the ice, in the body or in a volcano, it has the same half-life of 4.47 billion years.

3. You did say that you needed to look more into the data. If you didn't look at the whole data, why did you jump to conclusions?

But even if we can't find the DNA itself in either bones or amber, it still doesn't mean we can't recreate dinosaurs. Just like you said, we can either deduce a small portion of the genome from proteins in fossils, or compare modern bird and reptile genomes. Then we could design the parts we can't find using a computer. And of course, there is the chickenosaurus idea, as well as the Ratitosaurus idea of making chickenosaurs with ancient dinosaur genes in them.