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Worldbuilding, thank you for your time. I came to this site to ask a few questions and get advice, if possible, on a project I'm working on.

I have always been a fan Turok, Dino Crissis, Cage of Eden, and most recently Fosilfuel. So, this project is basically a love letter to the Prehistoric Horror genre.

A year ago, I read a news what said they may have found the degraded remnants of DNA on the bones of a Centrosaurus and a Hypacrosaurus. Aswell about a news about a scientists retrieved a 80-million-year-old dinosaur protein from a fossil. Don’t know if it has been proven or disproven.

But based on that, I'm planning on writing a series of prehistoric horror stories. The setting is based around the concept of cloned dinosaurs from the Madagascar’s Maastrichtian age, the last stage of Late Creastaceous. Through it would be a science fiction story, I still want my history to be grounded that are plausible, to do a soft science-fiction story.

The concept would be about a of natural substance, chemical or plausible natural occurrence what managed to preserve of proteins fragments from fossils of Majungasaurus, and Rapetosaurus what were near each other, possibly a preserved while locked in battle.

A group/organization of geneticist managed to get sufficient amount of preserved genetic material of Majungasaurus, and Rapetosaurus, enough at least for them to use birds and turtles to fill the missing gaps to form complete DNA structures and make a viable clone or at the very least the closest plausible recreation.

To avoid notice, the research is done in an island on the pacific, of 25kmx25km, of a warm, dry (though humid) coastal environment and seasonal rainfalls. Based on the real-world islands of Bonaire and Aruba. Because the prevailing climate of these Dinosaurs environment was semi-arid.

The Majungasaurus was chosen because being one of the last non-avian Dinosaurs what managed to still exist until the the K–Pg extinction. As well one of the better understood theropods.

The dinosaurs are let to inhabit the island, into a stable but isolated ecosystem. And the characters of a ship wreckage, end up trapped in the island.

So, supposing there was a unique substance or natural occurrence what may have helped preserve enough genetic material of the Majungasaurus and others for 66 million years, the questions are:

• What type of substance, chemical or natural occurrence, real or plausible, may help preserve the genetic materials of the Majungasaurus and others of the region for 66 million years, and viable enough to be cloned or closest genetic modified recreation?

Gratefull for any help or advice.

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you, A Rogue Ant, for the advice. I have edicted the enquiry into a single question. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Jose
    Sep 24, 2021 at 23:51
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    $\begingroup$ amber preserved mosquitoes full of dino blood <hums Jurassic Park theme> $\endgroup$
    – Willk
    Sep 25, 2021 at 2:22
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    $\begingroup$ It's not a duplicate but We discussed ice here // 35 million years is the last time the ice caps melted so that's as far as you can go with ice which isn't old enough, problem is ice flows, older ice gets squeezed out by new ice & melted, our oldest ice cores to date are maybe 8 million years but we might imagine a deep valley or cave where older ice is trapped // included to save people going over old ground with ice related answers. $\endgroup$
    – Pelinore
    Sep 26, 2021 at 9:42

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At this time my money is on Kilisis' answer as the most likely real world possibility.

But I do have an alternative very speculative ice based answer for you so here goes.

Ice Caves.

To keep the DNA usable throughout all that time you probably need to keep it cold.

But the ice caps are only maybe 45 million years old which won't get you back as far as you need.

Howsoever even when the surface ice is gone we can still expect the poles to be the coldest bits of the planet on average so even when there's no ice on the surface there might still be permafrost & certainly we can expect permafrost to persist longer at the poles than other areas at times there are no ice caps.

Go a little deeper & you might still have ice caves for much of the planets ice cap free periods.

So in this speculation we hope that somewhere in the landmass at the South Pole (there's none at the North Pole) there's a very old ice cave a dinosaur wandered into before it was an ice cave & that the temperature in the cave remained frosty like the Bandera Ice Cave while the ice cap's not there.

Antarctica back then was more or less on the south pole where it is now so it works on that level.

There are problems with this idea, one of which is why didn't the DNA degrade between the time the dinosaur wandered in & the first ice forms in the cave, you may perhaps have to add something like amber to this picture & have a bit of the dinosaur somehow trapped in resin & then somehow find its way into the cave (washed into it by rainwater perhaps).

Another problem could be timing, why would a new ice cave develop that wasn't there before the dinosaur wandered in or a piece of amber with a bit of it in got washed in? well a big asteroid did hit around then & that's going to have thrown a whole load of stuff into the air & caused a global temperature drop which might have been enough to get an ice cave started (& once started they can be remarkably persistent), information on global temperature changes following this impact & on ice cave formation & development from someone knowledgeable would be appreciated here.

Amber probably won't keep the DNA good on it's own but it should help keep it better during the necessary period when there's no ice in this scenario & that might be enough together with cooler temperatures for most of the time to give you usable DNA now, or maybe not, that's the best I can come up with though.

So you've sealed it in amber away from biological or chemical factors that might degrade it, buried it in a hole shielding it with rock from sunlight & other radiation that might degrade it then frozen it to stop anaerobic activity inside the amber that may degrade it, I don't think we can do any more.

The causes of DNA half life has to lie in some combination of those so we should have prevented it.

Now lets talk about probability, all of that coming together is a bit unlikely, I think that covers it?

There are other problems with the idea I'm sure but I've addressed all the ones I can see.

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  • $\begingroup$ Please try to cluster the edits in a single go. Else it might look like you are trying to bump the post up. $\endgroup$
    – L.Dutch ♦
    Sep 27, 2021 at 18:22
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    $\begingroup$ Your idea, andThe Square-Cube Law suggestion, are great! The last Majungasaurus and it’s young, find a dying Rapetosaurus in a beach cave, along with trees with Amber from the last flood. Seeing an opportunity, they attack The cave to collapses, crashing the dinosaurs against sharpened amber trees and burying them An Ice Cave is formed in Madagascar, from the cold winds and sun blocked time after the Asteroid. Preserving the DNA in both the Amber and Fossil, enough to be compared and get a better idea of the original DNA, using modern animals to fill the gaps to clone a replica of the Dinos $\endgroup$
    – Jose
    Sep 27, 2021 at 20:27
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    $\begingroup$ @L.Dutch bumping? no that wasn't my intent it's jut the way I work, sorry, I forgot to mention the workaround for the maximum 8 million age of ice cores we have to date that's in comments elsewhere & also have a potential issue with rock type I wanted to mention (some can be radioactive & part of the point of a cave is to protect the DNA from radiation that might degrade it) but my TV programs have appeared so they'll have to wait, unless you prefer I just leave it now. $\endgroup$
    – Pelinore
    Sep 27, 2021 at 21:33
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    $\begingroup$ @Jose not as such // any normal environment works // a severed toe or finger or a torn scrap of flesh from any random accident, fight or from hunting that happens to fall at the base or in a some suitable fork of a tree that has suitable resinous sap where some resin can flow over it from a tear in the bark (which may be connected or not to the events that led to the piece being there) then at some future point a flash flood or storm washes the hardened resin with it in into a cave at some point after that some temperature drop (thanks big rock from the sky) starts ice forming in the cave. $\endgroup$
    – Pelinore
    Sep 29, 2021 at 9:02
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    $\begingroup$ @Jose sufficient ice can be more or less self perpetuating in a ice cave given the right conditions, acts much like a giant ice house // you can probably afford decades (& maybe more) between the the small piece of dino being trapped in the resin then getting washed into the cave // there's a lot of random luck involved along with suitable geology & resin producing trees or plants of course. $\endgroup$
    – Pelinore
    Sep 29, 2021 at 9:14
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Genetic sequencing is currently moving by leaps and bounds. All it would take is a breakthrough and fossils in a cold cave or something similar I would think.

But currently everything I have read gives DNA viability a million to 7 million years tops. However that's theory, so it's open to interpretation and change.

There is another way though, we can currently see ghost hominid populations featured in our own genomes and even virus DNA from millions of years ago. So we may be able in the future to extrapolate the DNA sequence from dinosaur descendants somehow. The field is fairly new, very well financed and has some brilliant people working in it.

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    $\begingroup$ "everything I have read gives DNA viability a million to 7 million years tops" hmm, have you read this? 250 million years is the claim but I'm not entirely sure that it was supposed to be completely dormant the entire time (so counts) rather than slowly ticking over as extremophiles are apt to do (so doesn't count)? $\endgroup$
    – Pelinore
    Sep 25, 2021 at 11:04
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    $\begingroup$ @Pelinore very interesting, no I hadn't read it. I'm assuming the DNA estimates are DNA survival after the creature has died though. Obviously if you have a 15,000 year old tree, it's DNA is still fine because as long as it's alive it repairs it. It's a newish field though, it gets turned on it's head every so often as science progresses. $\endgroup$
    – Kilisi
    Sep 25, 2021 at 11:10
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    $\begingroup$ "Obviously if you have a 15,000 year old tree, it's DNA is still fine because as long as it's alive it repairs it" Yep, hence my counts / don't count mention as it's not clear to me from the article if it was supposed to be fully dead or dormant that whole time :) $\endgroup$
    – Pelinore
    Sep 25, 2021 at 11:13
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    $\begingroup$ DNA can be preserved indefinitely as long as it is kept below freezing, the 7 million year mark is just an estimated average based on molecular half life, which unlike nuclear half life is entirely based on conditions. as long as you have ice old enough it is possible, we just don't have any ice older than 8 million years old. $\endgroup$
    – John
    Sep 25, 2021 at 12:20
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    $\begingroup$ @John which is why my answer says a cold cave, there may well be some deep cave that has existed long enough, but there hasn't been permafrost old enough. For the purposes of a story it's reasonable enough $\endgroup$
    – Kilisi
    Sep 25, 2021 at 12:29
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Aliens did it.

No, really. All you need do is have the remains of an alien exploration camp. Just before the K-Pge extinction, some alien biologists had set up a field camp that had the bad luck to be caught in an landslide, or some other minor natural disaster. The aliens cleaned up and went on their way, so there's no bodies, and most of what remains isn't really useful (some remains of tents that don't have fabrics any more advanced than modern polymers, a few samples of written material that seem to be instructions for their equivalent of a porta-potty, and so on), but one incredibly useful thing has remained: one of the biologists unintentionally left behind the equivalent of a thumb datadrive.

The materials used to build it are extremely durable, which has some potential applications once they're figured out, but the more immediate prize is the data itself: it was stored in binary, and it can be read as the process wasn't too dissimilar to what's used in our SSD. What's been discovered looks to be field notes in the alien language (still in the process of being translated), but the real treasure was what turned out to be images: we have pictures of some wildlife from 66 (or whatever you want) million years ago, and attached to those images are files that were, eventually, recognized as being DNA sequences, probably of the animal in the associated image. And the people working on this realized they now had the entire genome of assorted extinct species.

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The problem with really old DNA is an issue with chemistry. DNA is not really stable over millions of years, because not only the bonds break - the cytosine in the DNA (the C in ACGT) becomes uracil over time, which makes for senseless genes.

If you wish to slow this process down, you need to freeze it.

When the dino killing asteroid hit, bits of the Earth were thrown in to space. Maybe some ambar with mosquitoes in it made it intact, and got surrounded by rocks to protect it from solar wind and UV light. At close to absolute zero DNA should last far longer, and you might just luck it out by finding it in an asteroid.

This may seem far-fetched, but remember, NASA was looking for signs of life in meteorites from Mars that fell onto the South Pole.

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    $\begingroup$ Ok, so the ejecta doesn't have to worry about Gs. But how much would it have been heated when it was accelerated into escape velocity? Assuming that it's not thoroughly cooked, what happens when it is in orbit? The only way to lose the "not quite cooked" heat is to radiate it (which is somewhat slow)... once the temperature becomes uniform throughout, does that cause problems (it would only take what, hours to day to get pretty cold)? All in all, this is a pretty good answer, you've got my +1. $\endgroup$
    – John O
    Sep 27, 2021 at 15:46
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    $\begingroup$ @JohnO if the ambar is buried in a huge mass of rock, that rock will insulate it. Much like unproperly microwaved food, the rock would be hot outside and cold inside. It might take millennia for thermal equilibrium to be reached, but DNA is useful for analysis all the qaybup to about 6.8 million years in normal temperatures - at close to zero kelvin it should last way more. Check the idea of panspermia - that life came to Earth on icy comets. $\endgroup$
    – The Square-Cube Law
    Sep 27, 2021 at 16:52
  • $\begingroup$ That is an interesting idea, and could work. But the Dinos I'm using are in Madagascar, which was in Late Cretaceous part of the supercontinent, Gondwana, in the south. And the Asteroid hit Laurasia in the north. But could a fragment of the asteroid as it fell hit the Madagascar region and threw a fragment of earth with an Amber crystalized with bits of flesh from a Majungasaurus and other dinos, as well bones into space, and become an Asteroid? Could the DNA still serve in theory, to clone a recreation using Modern Animals DNA to fill the gaps? $\endgroup$
    – Jose
    Sep 28, 2021 at 0:39
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    $\begingroup$ @jose the answer for your two questions is yes and it's complicated, respectively. DNA might be somewhat damaged; but due to conservstion by the freezing temperatures, you might be able to sequence it, and then artificially recreate it for cloning. $\endgroup$
    – The Square-Cube Law
    Sep 28, 2021 at 8:39
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Here's one, but you're not going to like it.

The DNA isn't that old.

The problem, as you've noted, is that DNA shouldn't survive millions of years, pretty much no matter what. Neither should any soft tissue.

...And yet, we have soft tissues. We have definitive proof that the Uniformitarian model has flaws. Given that, it's well within willing suspension of belief that viable DNA might be found. (After all, Jurassic Park didn't get hung up on the issue.)

However, there's another model that is also claimed to fit the available evidence, which claims dinosaurs were around as little as a couple thousand years ago, not millions: Young Earth Creationism. Perhaps you could write your story from this perspective, or perhaps you could just have DNA "turn up" and confuse the heck out of the Uniformitarians. It would make for an interesting story and an added layer of conflict to have evidence turn up that seems to soundly refute Uniformitarianism while providing ammunition to YECs.

Taking this idea and running with it doesn't mean your story has to implicitly endorse YEC, either. Maybe aliens have (for reasons which are surely inscrutable) been preserving dinosaurs elsewhere and introducing the odd still-living specimen to Earth every now and then, thus explaining legends of "dragons" and such. Maybe these aliens are even deliberately "leading on" YECs (for aforementioned inscrutable reasons). Really, you could have a lot of fun with this, whichever way you want to slant it...

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    $\begingroup$ I thought YEC hand-waved away dinosaurs with a "the Devil put the fossils there to mislead the heathens". $\endgroup$
    – John O
    Sep 27, 2021 at 15:42
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    $\begingroup$ @JohnO, hardly. Fossils are usually attributed to Noah's Flood] (which most YECs assert was global, not local). Oh, and I should note that Wikipedia is far from neutral; any topic on which Liberals/Naturalists/Athiests and Conservatives/Christians disagree tends to have a severe L/N/A bias; the YEC article is no exception. It's not surprising they would give equal coverage to false positions and extreme fringe beliefs. $\endgroup$
    – Matthew
    Sep 27, 2021 at 18:10
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    $\begingroup$ I'm not trying to bait you. I'm honestly curious about their beliefs and thought processes. My understanding is that their line of thought originates with the medieval tradition of Christianity, in which God's creation is constant and unchanging, which rules out extinction as a possible explanation. Therefore the only plausible explanation for fossils is deception (or, when possible to accept it, that the fossils are examples of extant fauna that have been misinterpreted... possibly because today's specimens are so much smaller). $\endgroup$
    – John O
    Sep 27, 2021 at 19:21
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    $\begingroup$ @JohnO, annoyingly, YEC's seem to have a dearth of good overview articles, or articles that aren't overtly religious. Since space here is limited, I will refer you here. That should hopefully get you started. The key "thought process" is not a priori excluding miracles (as Naturalism does) and taking the Bible to be historic. That's not to say that YEC's necessarily choose the Bible over the evidence, per the usual accusations, but allow it to shape interpretations and treat discrepancies as cause for further study. $\endgroup$
    – Matthew
    Sep 27, 2021 at 19:57
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    $\begingroup$ To respond to your other points... your impression of YECs looks like a malicious caricature (hardly surprising) you've been fed. The idea that "God's creation is constant and unchanging" sounds suspiciously like a straw man, as the Flood was massively disruptive. Nor would most YECs (even historically, I think) deny that extinction can and has occurred. Show someone 500 years ago a dinosaur and he might well (and rightly?) say "oh, yeah, George killed one of those". $\endgroup$
    – Matthew
    Sep 27, 2021 at 20:02

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