Do you think there will come a time when scientists can 'clone' a dinosaur?

I think we will eventually learn how to create DNA from scratch. So it could be done in the future. And it probably will. Hopefully I will be dead by then.

Wow, I hadn’t even thought of the possibility of creating DNA from scratch. Do you mean that you think we will be able to select the necessary chromosomes and put them together to create whatever form of creature we want, without even have a template of one that already exists?

we can already synthesize dna. the problem is synthesizing large pieces of DNA (entire chromosomes). a couple years ago craig venters group made a viral genome from scratch and showed that their synthesized dna was capable of infection and replication.

the other serious obstacle is obtaining accurate sequencing data for extinct organisms like dinosaurs. often this dna is contaminated with bacterial dna and other microbes making it difficult to determine what dna is the dinosaurs. if we can get accurate reads of a dinosaur, then the genome will be easy to synthesize.

the next question is how to produce a living dinosaur. there has been talk about this with the woolly mammoth. theoretically an african elephant could serve as a donor womb. and the woolly mammoth could be crossed with an elephant to eventually yield a full mammoth

Good question. Just like the shroud of mystery around artificial intelligence and robot revolution, there is a stigma attached to cloned dinosaurs because of stories and movies where everything turns out brutally awful.

I’m guessing that it would be very complicated to clone the dinosaurs. We couldn’t clone a genetically stable sheep embryo for the longest time. We wouldn’t be cloning dinosaurs from their prime. We would probably be cloning mentally retarded handicapped dinosaurs.