Analysis:
Acquisition of dinosaur gene fragments
Generally found in dinosaur eggs, their shells and egg cavities have been completely petrified. At the beginning of 1993, a collector in Zhengzhou, Henan Province collected a very special fossil, which was a late Cretaceous type C dinosaur egg unearthed in Xixia County, Henan Province. Its shell is hard, oblate, complete and crack-free, with a diameter of 9 cm. This dinosaur egg was broken in two in an accident. Collectors found from the broken place that in the hard shell, there was a kind of gray-brown flocculent soft substance wrapped, which looked very wet. After preliminary identification, the "special" flocs in dinosaur eggs are mainly silicate clay minerals. People keep this dinosaur egg in geological museum. A professor from Peking University Academy of Life Sciences took about 20 mg of flocculent inclusions from this "special" fossil and did two experiments: burning them in an electric furnace for one minute, and then observing them under a microscope, and found that some flocculent inclusions were partially burnt, but they could not be burned, which proved that they contained organic substances; According to chemical analysis, the flocculent inclusion contains 0.5% ~ 65438 0% amino acids. 1995 March 15, Xinhua News Agency revealed an important news in Beijing: A group of scientists in Peking University, using molecular biotechnology and experimental equipment established in recent years, confirmed that DNA did exist in this "special" dinosaur egg, and successfully obtained six dinosaur gene fragments. This is the first time that humans have obtained dinosaur genetic material from dinosaur eggs.
As we all know, dinosaur eggs have been unearthed in other countries and regions of the world and China since the discovery of dinosaur eggs in southern France in the late19th century, but it is unprecedented to find living biological macromolecules from these fossils buried for thousands of years. Therefore, the final conclusion needs to be very cautious and recognized by the international academic community before it can be concluded.
Some people may ask: genes are the units that store and record biological genetic information. Now that the gene fragments of dinosaurs have been obtained from dinosaur eggs, can we breed lively little dinosaurs on this basis?
The scientist's answer is no, because to copy a living dinosaur, the minimum condition is to find out how many genes this dinosaur has, such as thousands or tens of thousands. At present, this is still unknown. Even if a small number of dinosaur gene fragments are obtained now, they are only a drop in the ocean compared with the whole dinosaur gene.
1On September 24th, 994, the genetic material of dinosaurs was extracted for the first time in the United States.
1On September 24th, 994, the research team led by Jack Horner, a paleontologist at the University of Montana, USA, extracted genetic material from a dinosaur skeleton 65 million years ago for the first time.
Horner's research involves the thigh bone of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the DNA molecules isolated from it are similar to the genetic material of modern birds, indicating that there is some form of correlation between them.
However, Horner and Woodward both stressed that although DNA molecules can be "amplified" and copied, they are only a small part of biological genetic material, which is not enough to provide a basis for dinosaur "reconstruction".