Murdergurl
will turn your insides into your outsides
Random question of the day:
Would it be possible to clone extinct animals through fossilized mosquitoes like in the Jurassic Park franchise?
Short answer: nahForgive me if I’m mistaken but I believe the idea was that the mosquito was preserved in amber, not fossilized. Fossilization is a process that involves the body’s organic components being replaced with mineral components over time, requiring a number of conditions I don’t entirely recall, thus what you get in the end is essentially a mold of the original creature. The conceit in Jurassic Park is that the mosquitos, and more specifically, the blood inside them, would have been protected from ravages of time, namely when it comes to decomposition, in other words it would have remained in an organic state and good enough condition to extract the DNA.
In reality though, that level of preservation is just not possible, not with simply amber. Externally sourced bacteria and animals certainly accelerate the decomposition process, but organic components will over time break down on their own and with the bacteria that already exists in our bodies even if nothing external comes. And there certainly was a lot of time between now and the time when these Mosquitos would’ve died.
Now that being said, while something like the dinosaurs would be impossible to save, there are plenty of dead species of animals who were lost a lot more recently. I don’t think we are at the level of generic research, understanding and technology were we could reconstruct an animal from a sample of DNA alone, but in theory I believe such advancements might be possible and applicable to more recently extinct animals.