Among my movie favorites are the Jurassic Park trilogy. If you recall from the first movie, the dinosaurs were created by mixing dinosaur DNA with frog DNA. In those days, reptiles were considered the closest species to dinosaurs. If the movie were made today, probably they would have used birds. But, anyway, the dinosaur DNA was extracted from dinosaur blood within mosquitoes encased in amber. Actually, even on the face of it, this seemed very unlikely. How many insects encased in amber would you need before you found one that had bitten any particular dinosaur species? The chances would be one in a million that you would find any dinosaur blood at all.
In addition, biologists and paleontologists pooh-poohed the idea that biological matter would last millions of years. Even the original skeletal material in the bones of dinosaurs and other extinct species found has been replaced by inert minerals. Thus, the entire idea of recreating an extinct species that roamed the earth millions of years ago was considered impossible. Until very recently!
In a recent Scientific American article, Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist, using a microscope, wrote how she and her assistant discovered tiny red spheres inside a slice of fossilized dinosaur bone. The slice was from a dinosaur that lived 67 million years ago. Since then, other bits of organic material such as bones, blood cells and claws have survived the ages.
Of course, at this point it is not known whether the organic material contains enough of the original DNA that was in it when the creature was alive. And even if it were, how could it be used to create a replica? But who knows? Maybe in the future some enterprising entrepreneur may open a Jurassic Park.
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