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A comment on Fossilized blood cells found in 115M-year-old dinosaur bone. Parent comment

Re:Fossilized blood cells found in 115M-year-old dinosaur bone by snthpy on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:22AM (#50362394)
Totally uninformed question but can we not reverse out the original DNA sequence from all the descendants?

I've seen similar things in a linguistics documentary where they guess at proto-languages from the ones spoken today.

If we can't, then what about our coming AI protectors? Are we doing enough to align them with our fascination with dinosaurs?

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Re:Fossilized blood cells found in 115M-year-old dinosaur bone by andrewflnr on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @10:20AM (#50366846)
Proto language reconstruction is already full of guesswork and we have a pretty good spread of descendants to work with. With dinosaurs, we have a very narrow set of descendants from much longer ago. There's not enough information. There's an attempt run by Jack Horner known as the chickenosaurus project, but it's widely regarded as stupid (also Horner is an Epstein alum).

I'll assume your line about "coming AI protectors" was a joke.

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Re:Fossilized blood cells found in 115M-year-old dinosaur bone by gus_massa on Thursday November 05, 2026 @08:26AM (#50378806)
Birds are the decendadants of only one branch of dinosaurs, so in the best case we can only get one/a few.

My guess is mostly yes. There are a lot of guess and different resuls from different methods to reconstruct the tree, but I guess mostly yes.

My guess is that the main problem is money. It would be super expensive, take a few years/decades and get $0.

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