Question: Do you think we will be able to clone extinct creatures in the future? I know people have already tried but so far they have failed, apart from Dolly the sheep, but sheep aren't going extinct anytime soon. Maybe we will be able to clone dinosaurs too, like Jurassic Park?

Lilian Hunt answered on 19 Mar 2014:

If we want to successfully clone an extinct animal our first hurdle would be finding that animal’s DNA in a good enough condition to work from. This means it would need to be almost completely intact (DNA can break down over time). One idea is that some good candidates would be recently preserved animals in museums or ones we could find in the frozen soils that formed after the last ice age.

Dinosaurs are therefore unlikely to make the cut as with the millions of year that pass we would be lucky to find any intact DNA at all let alone the amount we would need!

The next hurdle is we would need a surrogate mother. We clone animals by making egg cells with our cloned DNA in them, and then letting an unrelated mother animal carry the baby and give birth to it. Unfortunately this rules out dinosaurs again as we don’t have any living animals similar enough to them to carry the cloned baby dinosaurs! Some of the closest living relatives to a T-rex are chickens and ostriches! Not really suitable for carrying a T-rex baby…!

But that does give us some other options. Some Japanese scientists said in 2011 that they were going to clone a wolly mammoth within 5 years. Good, preserved wolly mammoth specimens have been found int he frozen arctic tundra and with elephants being a good candidate to carry their cloned woolly mammoth babies it could be possible…

Also, the pyrenean ibex has technically already been cloned however the baby died of a lung difficulty 7 minutes after birth 🙁
(other ideas included the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the woolly rhino, the tasmanian tiger, the moa (like an emu), the carolina parakeet, and the irish elk!)