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Newly discovered half-life of DNA douses any plans to revive dinosaurs

Newly discovered half-life of DNA douses any plans to revive dinosaurs

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Dreams that mankind would one day be able to resurrect dinosaurs in some fashion can be put to rest as scientists have discovered that DNA is unreadable after just 1.5 million years. As told by Nature, Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen, Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, and a group of palaeogeneticists studied over a 150 bones of the extinct moa bird which still had traces of DNA that ranged from 600 to 8,000 years old.

Through examination, it was found that the half life of DNA is 521 years, which means that after 6.8 million years not a single bond would be in tact as a result of a number of factors including the age of the sample, storage, and even the time of the year that the creature died. Although this means that we cannot revive ancient reptiles even with advanced genetic technology — dinosaurs are believed to have become extinct about 65 million years ago — the study does pave the way for new discoveries since the oldest recorded DNA sequence is only about half a million years old.