fossilized bugs blood for...

[OrionX]

well i was watching Jurassic Park and it hit me..

could you actually extract dna from a mosquito that lived millions of years ago who sucked up a dinos blood and use the dna to try and mold some creature out of it?

[flyboy2112]

Not with current technology, for certain. As far as if this is possible at all, I don't know.

[FlyingKiwi]

I think any useable blood within the mosquito would have long since decayed, even if the body of the mosquito itself had been preserved.

[rebellious_teen]

Isn't it something to do with the bug being stuck in amber?

[standardstate]

I would say possible, but not with current technology.

There will be few samples of dna that will be preserved for 80 million years, and they will have been heavily corrupted. However, given enough dna one could likely find the original dna statistically.

The problem is like what you might have if you had a million copies of hamlet, all cut up into small fragments with most of the fragments destroyed. It would be painful to reconstruct hamlet from this starting material, but it could likely be done. Since most of the "grunt work" would be done by computer it might not even be that difficult if an appropriate sample of dna could be found and the dna amplified.