In the 20 years since the movie Jurassic Park fantasized about how dinosaurs could be cloned from blood found in ancient amber-trapped mosquitoes, fossil collectors have been on the hunt for a similar specimen. Over the years, a few different groups of scientists have claimed to find a fossilized mosquito with ancient blood trapped in its abdomen, but each of these teams’ discoveries, in turn, turned out to be the result of error or contamination.

For many, the Natural History Museum is a place that inspires learning, gives purpose and provides hope. People tell us they 'still get shivers walking through the front door', and thank us for inspiring the next generation of scientists. To reverse the damage we've done and protect the future, we need the knowledge that comes from scientific discovery. Understanding and protecting life on our planet is the greatest scientific challenge of our age. And you can help. What led to your discovery that cell organelles could be preserved in specimens ensconced in amber? We don't think it is from modern contamination. The blood cells have nuclei and you don't find those in mammals, so it must be a reptilian red blood cell. We compared it with red blood cells from birds and it showed some morphological similarities. Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement ( AMBER) is a family of force fields for molecular dynamics of biomolecules originally developed by Peter Kollman's group at the University of California, San Francisco. When under specific circumstances blood does preserve, it doesn't mean that scientists will find DNA in it. So even if a dinosaur's blood was found inside an ancient insect, an opportunity to recreate the reptile from it isn't guaranteed.

Could we clone a dinosaur?

That work led to a lifelong obsession with amber, in which Poinar would find, among other specimens, the oldest known bee, the first known bat fly fossil, and the most complete flower from the Cretaceous Period. And just this past February, he co-authored a paper in Nature Plants describing a new species of neotropical flower found in amber from the mid-Tertiary Period. So looking for these various pathogens—it’s been kind of a goal of mine, because I feel that they can show how these organisms evolved over a long period of time, even long before humans entered the scene. Ancient DNA has so far been recovered from permafrost, as well as from subfossils - bones or body parts that have not yet fossilised. A genome is the complete set of DNA of a living thing. Without the full genome, it would be impossible to tell which parts of the DNA have been found and therefore impossible to fill the gaps to build a whole animal.

Now that the team has found that it is technically possible to extract DNA from resin, the next steps are to analyze gradually older samples, using more sensitive sequencing methods, to determine just how long DNA could last. After all, there’s quite a window between two years and 100 million. VigLink sets this cookie to show users relevant advertisements and also limit the number of adverts that are shown to them.

Every year, more people are reading our articles to learn about the challenges facing the natural world. Our future depends on nature, but we are not doing enough to protect our life support system. Pollution has caused toxic air in our cities, and farming and logging have wreaked havoc on our forests. Climate change is creating deserts and dead zones, and hunting is driving many species to the brink of extinction. This is the first time in Earth's history that a single species - humanity - has brought such disaster upon the natural world. But if we don't look after nature, nature can't look after us. We must act on scientific evidence, we must act together, and we must act now.