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Asked by chloewildman to Chris, Eva, Michael, Paddy, Philip on 21 Jun 2011.
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Paddy Brock answered on 21 Jun 2011:
No, but their ancestors are still flying around today. Birds are descended from dinosaurs in the same way that we are descended from apes (although we evolved from apes much more recently than birds did from dinosaurs). We discussed the science of Jurassic park last week: they do find mosquitoes in amber, and they can even find bits of genetic code from bacteria and fungi in amber which they can use to guess things about the climate and what other kinds of animals and plants were living at the time, but they wouldn’t find dinosaur blood in the mosquitoes. And if they did, we don’t have the technology (yet) to create an organism from scratch just using its genetic code.
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Chris Jordan answered on 21 Jun 2011:
That’s fun – birds are really dinosaurs. Jurassic Park Chickens!
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Michael Wharmby answered on 21 Jun 2011:
I hope dinosaurs never walk the Earth again – some of them were pretty scary!
Once a species goes extinct that’s it. We can clone existing living things, but as Paddy says we can’t create from scratch. Also dinosaur DNA would be pretty badly damaged after 65 million years or more, so we’d have to find other species to patch it with.
As to birds, it is neat – think about it next time you see geese fighting or that seagull wandering around trying to steal your chips. Some relatively recent fossils of baby T-rex are show feathers or at least some form of downy covering to keep them warm (this is thought to be shed in later life). And then there is archaeopteryx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeopteryx) – fossils of this dinosaur definitely show feathers and wing-like features, so there’s your link. -
Philip Denniff answered on 21 Jun 2011:
Hi Chloe I don’t think dinosaurs will every walk the world again. The theory of evolution predicts that species can only evolve in one direction; they can only go forwards, cannot go backwards. So that is not a route for their reappearance. However birds or something else (crocodiles may be) could evolve into something that looked like dinosaurs but would be something else. As Paddy suggested there is the DNA route but there again there are problems.
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