Answer 1:
There are living dinosaurs. They have wings and
most of them can fly.
Cloning a dinosaur poses exactly the same
challenges as cloning any other animal, and
cloning an extinct dinosaur poses the same
challenges as cloning any other long-extinct
animal. Birds are living dinosaurs and have (of
course) dinosaur DNA. Crocodiles are the closest
living relatives of dinosaurs that *aren't* birds,
so we can do comparisons between the DNA and other
biology of birds and crocodiles to get a better
idea of what some of the extinct dinosaurs were
like, but this only goes so far. The reason is
because many dinosaurs, for example Triceratops
and most of the rest of the large, plant-eating
dinosaurs, went extinct without any living
descendents, and yet had millions of years of
evolution that led to them since their last common
ancestor with anything that's alive now. Just
think: the amount of time between Triceratops and
Stegasaurus, both of which were of the group of
dinosaurs that did not lead to birds, is about 80
million years (Stegasaurus lived about 145 million
years ago and Triceratops lived 65 million years
ago). This means that there is more time
separating these two dinosaurs than there is
separating Triceratops from humans!
What would happen if we suddenly found, say, a
living descendent of Triceratops? It would answer
a lot of questions, and pose a whole lot more (as
scientific discovery always does). I doubt we'd be
able to recreate a living Triceratops from it,
though, for the same reason why we can't recreate
a living Tyranosaurus from living birds, and
Tyranosaurus does belong to the same group of
meat-eating dinosaurs that birds evolved from
within. There's just been too much evolution in
that time.
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