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190 Million Year Old Dinosaur Embyro
leprasmurf writes "Sci Tech Today is reporting that scientists have cracked open a 190-million-year-old egg to reveal the oldest known dinosaur embryo. Examination of the fetal skeleton suggests the hatchling would have required parental care to survive. This would be the earliest evidence of nurturant behavior, more than 100 million years earlier than previous examples." The University of Toronto has a release about this as well. From the article: "According to Reisz, what makes this discovery particularly significant is the ability to put the embryos into a growth series and work out for the first time how these animals grew from a tiny, 15 centimetre embryo into a five metre adult. 'This has never been done for a dinosaur. Only Massospondylus is represented by embryos as well as by numerous articulated skeletons of juveniles and adults. The results have major implications for our understanding of how these animals grew and evolved,' he says."
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Even if scientists cannot extract the entire genetic code of dinosaurs from the blood samples, the scientists could make educated guesses. They then complete what, in their opinion, is the genetic code of a particular dinosaur. They then inject this code into a de-nuclearized egg of, say, a Komodo lizard to create a cloned embryo. Scientists can then use the embryonic fossilized bones to verify whether their guess is accurate. The scientists simply compare the fossilized bones with the bones of the developing embryo. If they are an exact match, then the scientists have likely cloned the genetic code of a particular dinosaur specimen.