Dinosaur DNA, anyone?

Not yet, and maybe there will never be any, says John Asara, a pathology instructor at Harvard Med. School. Asara led a team in may 2009 that successfully extracted protiens from two dinosaur fossils discovered in Montana.

The team is sequencing the proteins to investigate how birds are related to dinosaurs. But getting DNA from such fossil proteins is impossible because generic material breaks down thus ruined over time.

"There is very little DNA left in fossils, that are more than 100,000 years old", said Michael Hofreiter, a geneticist at the university of York in UK. "It is fragmented and there is a lot of contamination from other organisms, including bacteria, fungi and usually humans."

Although scientists have successfully recovered prehistoric DNA from other creature, dinosaur fossils are actualy too old to be extracted from. DNA is also unstable unless constantly repaired and recovered inside a living cell, even under optmial preservation conditions, it is imposible that DNA could remain millions of years whithout being deformed and ruined. So it is far from possible that it could pass 65 million years that have passes since dinosaurs extinction.

Despite the lack of dinosaure DNA, generic material has provided many insights into later species, november 2009, researchers at Penn state university announced that they had recovered a large section of the woolly-mammoth genome dated 20,000 to 60,000 year old. Researchers hope that analysis of the recovered DNA will explaine the processes that led species toward its fate nowadays.