FOXSYLVANIA

– – Just when the Jurassic Park films had us hoping for such a real-life scenario, it turns out to be virtually impossible owing to the calculated half-life of DNA, which figures out to be only around 521 years. 

A team of paleogeneticists tested 158 leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant moa birds which ranged from 600 to 8,000 years old, running a series of comparisons between the age of the various bones and DNA degradation within each specimen.  The DNA half-life worked out to about 521 years in specimens kept at swamp temperatures.  Even a more ideal preservation temperature of minus 5 degrees Celsius would only result in readable DNA from specimens up to 1.5 million years old, far less than would be required to reconstitute a T-Rex or raptor…

This entry was posted on October 11, 2012 at 1:53 am and is filed under extinct species, scalies, science. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: DNA degradation