Like anyone, I would like to see real dinosaurs at least one time in my life. However, many scientists will tell you: “It’s impossible, we need dinosaur DNA, and it can not stay intact for several millions of years”. Let’s say, right, we cannot find and analyze real dinosaur DNA but, we can predict the DNA using machine learning.
Let’s check possible methods to revive dinosaurs!
First Method: find DNA in fossil
After Jurassic Park’s books and movies have been released, scientists tried to make it real. They looked for DNA in mosquito and in dinosaur fossil, they find some blood cells and many other incredible things but no exploitable DNA.
Second Method: dinosaurs are still here
All the dinosaurs did not disappear, birds are dinosaurs’ descendant and their DNA keep many genes which if activated can make them go back in time and look them like a dinosaur. However, even if we can make chickens closer to dinosaurs, only a small proportion of dinosaurs are birds ancestors. Most famous of them, like the tyrannosaur, are very different from them. But, …, I want to see a tyrannosaur ! (in fact, I prefer triceratops)
Third Method: machine learning
Machine learning is designed to predict an output using a set of samples. In your case, we have all (in fact a part of all):
- Input: Animal data (size, color, shape, behavior, …)
- Output: DNA
For dinosaurs, we almost only have skeleton, and we can only guess other parameters like color or behaviors. But making an animal who looks like a dinosaur is a good start.
The sample set can be obtained using current animals like cats, birds, fish, insects. Of course, birds or lizard DNA seems more useful in your case.
After our model predicted dinosaur DNA, we have to check our result, we will not put the DNA in an egg and check the result, I am quite sure just nothing will happen because our DNA candidate is just not working. We have to simulate the DNA evolution in a virtual egg and use this result to optimize our model.
The resulting DNA should give an animal with the same skeleton of the targeted dinosaur. However, dinosaur behaviors or organ can be very different from the original dinosaur. This is not good for our aim, but it could be a good thing, since we want a dinosaur which can live in our world, that means eat current vegetables and resist to current bacteria or viruses.
Conclusion
There is still much research to be achieved, in order to be able to simulate the DNA evolution or to simply be able to create the predicted DNA molecule. However, the method itself looks very simple and efficient to resolve our problem.
