Haven't people been trying to clone a mammoth for quite a while now? I thought the problem was there wasn't any viable DNA. If this is possible, what will be surrogate parent for the T-Rex, Velociraptor, and triceratops?
A Komodo Dragon maybe??
Sorry if I'm offending anyone, just a pet peeve of mine here. Komodo Dragons are not even remotely closely related to dinosaurs and never have been. Komodo Dragons are just giant monitor lizards (and thus no more closely related to dinosaurs than most other reptiles), not some last-of-their-kind dinosaur branch.
Also, no DNA is likely to have survived for over 65 million years; the molecules are just too unstable, as supported by the fact that mammoth DNA is heavily damaged after only a few thousand years.
And even if dinosaurs could be resurrected, they were still just animals, not hyperintelligent Hollywood superpredators.
It's ok, no offense taken, I didn't mean for it to come off that they are last of their kind dinosaur branch. I only mentioned them due to their size, and I just assumed that some type of large reptile would serve as a surrogate.
That being said, I want the Dodo bird to come back
It's fine. Reptiles tend to suffer from being an unnatural group. Sort of like protists, reptiles are "leftover ancestors" that lie at the base of the mammal and bird lineages in sort of a haphazard pile. While they may seem near-identical on the outside, internally they're quite different. The internal organs of a Komodo Dragon are very different from those of a crocodile, for instance, with the crocodile's anatomy being much closer to that of a bird.
Surprised? Crocs are much more closely related to birds (through dinosaurs, of course) than they are to lizards. The main reason they look more like lizards is because they split off from dinosaurs rather early and went with a niche that didn't require too much change after they'd settled in. Actually, the ancestors of crocodiles were much more lightly built and active than their modern-day descendants. I'll leave you with a reconstruction of
Euparkeria, a little reptile close to the common ancestry of crocodiles and dinosaurs.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/images/taxa/verts/euparkeria_skeleton.gifEDIT: I'd like to see the Dodo come back too. They're just so awkward it's cute.
