Hello and welcome to mysteries of science. My name's Stevie and I'm the deputy editor of

Science and Nature, the monthly magazine from the team behind the week junior. And I'm Michael,

the junior editor. On this podcast, we take a look at our favorite mysteries of science. These are

the strange phenomena and bizarre events that have left scientists scratching their heads and,

despite their best efforts, remain well and truly unsolved.

Today we've got a fantastic episode for you. We're going to be answering your mysteries.

These are the burning, mind-boggling questions that you want the answers to.

Now, we won't be answering these alone. We've assembled a top team of experts to help us

give you the answers you're looking for.

So let's dive in. This is Mysteries of Science.

So Michael, what's our first question? Well, here's a question that Sam Wardill asked us

in an Apple podcast's review. Could we bring dinosaurs back to life using DNA? Oh, what a great

question. Who are we going to get to answer this DNA? Oh, what a great question!

Who are we going to get to answer this one? Well, Stevie, you might remember we did a whole episode about dinosaurs in this season of Mysteries of Science, and you might remember us speaking to Cameron Muskelly. Hello there, my name is Cameron Muskelly. I'm a self-taught paleontologist. I'm based in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm a paleontology educator,

so I use the fossils and what I have to educate the community on paleontology and geology.

I love dinosaurs as a kid, and I'm happy to do and talk about anything that has to involve dinosaurs. Oh, it's great to have Cameron back. Now, bringing dinosaurs back to life using DNA. That's what they did in

Jurassic Park, right? It is exactly, Jurassic Park, one of my all-time favorite films. So,

to understand whether this is something we could do in real life, I asked Cameron to first explain

to us how they did it in the film. So the thing with Jurassic Park is they were actually using amber from the amber mines

in Dominican Republic and there was a blood-sucking insect.

I think in the movie it was considered to be a mosquito.

And they were using the blood from the mosquito because the mosquito was drinking dinosaur blood and they were using the blood from the DNA or actually from the mosquito and they were using the the blood from the mosquito to try to recreate something like a dinosaur in the movie they actually used frog DNA to fill in the gaps of the genetic sequence because they didn't have everything there was with the dinosaur DNA.

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