Scientist Jack Horner: Real-life Jurassic Park any day now

The findings serve as definitive evidence that blood was preserved inside the insect. But at this point, scientists have no way of knowing what creature’s fossilized blood fills the mosquito’s abdomen. That’s because DNA degrades way too quickly to possibly survive 46 million years of being trapped in stone (or in amber, for that matter). Recent research had found it has a half-life of roughly 521 years, even under ideal conditions.

This means that even if we miraculously had some DNA of the ancient creature, there are currently a ton of technical problems that prevent the cloning similar to that in Jurassic Park from becoming a reality. Assembling a full genome from DNA fragments requires us to have an understanding of what the whole genome looks like (which we don’t have in this case), and turning that into a living, breathing animal would necessitate putting that DNA into an ovum of a living species very closely related to the mystery creature that we don’t know in the first place.