Will dinosaurs come back? Do you think dinosaurs will come back, if they are coming back, are you scared, amazed, speechless? You might think “How can extinct animals come back?” and also many people have this question: Will Dinosaurs come back? We will answer that question today, but we will talk about it in the end. 

First, let’s talk about how dinosaurs got extinct. At the end of the Cretaceous period, an asteroid named Chicxulub Crater hit the earth, where the dinosaurs were. The size of the Chicxulub Crater was 6.2137 m diameter. After the asteroid hit the dinosaurs died, not all of the dinosaurs died, the dinosaurs that had fur evolved into birds and survived also due to their size. When the asteroid hit, dinosaurs were dying. The plants died and the herbivores couldn’t eat. Carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus Rex relied on plant eaters ,so they had to kill them. Then mammals came to earth and we still have them. 

After you think of this, you might think, since there were no humans, how do humans know about dinosaurs? In 1842 British scientist Sir Richard Owen announced the Discovery of Dinosaurs. Sir Richard Owen described the animals with thick limb bones and strong reinforced hips. 2 decades earlier scientists already knew the discovery because the first of these dinosaurs-to-be was discovered by William Buckland in 1824. William Buckland was under the name Megalosaurus and his imagination was to be a fearsome predator lizard with a total length of 18-21 m (60-70 ft).

The second dinosaur-to-be was Gideon Mantell, a medical doctor and amateur fossil collector from a small market in Lewes, East Sussex in Southern England. In the early 1820’s Gideon Mantell obtained some unusual fossil teeth that came from Tilgate Grit. In 1825 Gideon Mantell named the animal Iguanodon. The teeth were like iguanas and also like a big lizard but enormous. The length is 30 m (100 feet).

The third dinosaur-to-be was similar to the Iguanodon and the fossils are from East Sussex. The specimen was uncovered by workers but it blasted into fragments. Gideon Mantell was able to fit it back together and in 1833 he named it Hylaeosaurus. It’s a big armored reptile with large conical spines arranged on the neck and shoulders. Hylaeosaurus was not familiar like the Megalosaurus and the Iguanodon.  

In 1842 Sir Richard Owen wanted to unite the Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and the  Megalosaurus into a group called the Dinosauria. He argued that the name meant for dinosaurs was “fearfully great lizards”, he also downsized the Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and the Megalosaurus to 9 m ( 30 ft). Sir Richard Owen’s thinking wasn’t entirely accurate. 

More discoveries were made in the 1860’s and showed that not all dinosaurs are elephantine monsters, but there were also small species. The Hypsilophodon which is from England and the Compsognathus from Germany were to make the difference from dinosaurs and birds. The Archaeopteryx named from Germany in 1861 demonstrated that birds lived alongside dinosaurs. 

In the 1850’s first dinosaur fossils were found in North America. In 1855 Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, a geologist, collected fossil teeth from the Creatcous badlands which are in Montana. There were many things like dinosaur footprints but described by the Reverend Edward Hitchcock that were thought to be bird tracks. The fossil teeth that were found were indicated to the Iguanodon and the Megalosaurus in 1858. When the Hadrosaurus (the first  duck-billed dinosaur to ever be found) was discovered in New Jersey. It was related to the Iguanodon, but it’s bones were suggest a kangaroo-like body. So the Iguanodon wasn’t like a giant lizard but a giant kangaroo. By the end of the century, Dinosaurs were more clear to humans of how they look like, what groups they’re in, and more.

Close to Discovery Of Bringing Back Dinosaurs

The Natural History Museum was so close to the discovery of bringing dinosaurs back. Insects were feeding in dinosaur’s blood and also may have their DNA. Amber is tree resin and when the insects are on the trees the insects get stuck in the Amber. Amber can be fossilized due to high pressure and temperature conditions and is covered in layers of sediment for thousands of years. The Amber has been turned into a gemstone by humans for thousands of years. 

The insect is still there, with its dinosaur blood in its body. The insect may help to bring back dinosaurs. When preserved the Amber preserves the husk not the tissues so because of this reason Jurassic World won’t be real, but they are not giving up yet. Blood residue has been found inside ancient insects. Even though there is blood in the insect it doesn’t necessarily have DNA so we still haven’t found it yet. 

     If we have found dinosaur DNA we will fill the holes with frog DNA, but they need a whole genome. A genome is the complete set of DNA from that animal. Without the whole thing it’s impossible to fill in the gaps to build a whole animal. If you had a complete genome you would fill the fragments with bird DNA because dinosaurs are birds, or crocodile DNA because they share a common ancestor. 

Now, this was the moment all of you have been waiting and I will tell you if dinosaurs will come back. First it’s not a yes or no question, but it depends on scientists. Scientists still have to find the DNA and it might take millions of years to find it, but in the future we never know if scientists will eventually give up on dinosaurs coming back into the world. 

Credits:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/the-19th-century-discovery-of-dinosaurs/

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosaurs-back.html