Re: Jurassic Park Cloning, a pondering

[Randy King <randyk@ims.com>]

I formerly wrote
> 
>>Given a complete understanding of DNA, would it be possible to 
>>figure out dinosaur DNA from what we currently know about 
>>a dinosaur. Granted we could determine a superset of what the 
>>creature would have had, but would that provide any useful 
>>information? I suspect we couldn't really answer that without 
>>the premise - a complete understanding of DNA, but I'm 
>>curious about people's speculation on the subject. 

I don't think I expressed myself very well, perhaps I should have changed
the subject line.  Regardless...

My thoughts were, without actually going through the cloning process 
necessarily,
could we learn something from examining the DNA patterns?

If we calculated all DNA that gave us everything we do know about a dinosaur, 
pick
T. rex, then we would have a superset of T. rex DNA.  Presumably this could be 
pruned down.  Maybe some would have nothing in common with known relatives of
T. rex.  Whatever remained would still represent a  superset.  If all members 
of this
set contained a given characteristic, we could infer that T. rex had this 
characteristic.
But would there actually be anything to infer?  Would the exercise be useful?  
I'm sure
its well beyond our current computational capabilities, not to mention 
biological.  But
I was curious.