Paleontologist against Cloning

Since you were a kid, you've been absolutely fascinated with dinosaurs. By age 5, you knew all the names of the saurischians and ornithischians and pointed out with glee as often as possible that birds are really "feathered dinosaurs." (You must have read the Jurassic Park book a dozen times!). Your favorite dinosaur sites are in Argentina where hundreds of sauropod eggs and some embryonic dinosaurs were discovered at the end of the last century. As much as you would love to see, hear, smell, and touch a living dinosaur, you'll have to check what's in the literature to substantiate doubts--based on what your geneticist colleagues tell you--that the technology will ever be developed to resurrect dinosaurs from the past. Point out that evolution cannot be controlled, not even by us. According to S.J. Gould, chance plays such an important role in evolution that using the Earth's past as a "future forecast" is foolish. Scientists will no doubt continue to debate if dinosaur DNA is fossilized intact or if it has survived in good enough shape to be used in cloning experiments. Even if the technology is developed that can replicate an entire genome from scraps of fossil DNA, consider if it's relevant to the case you'll argue in court that the Mesozoic world of the dinosaurs no longer exists--many of the dinosaurs' cohort species, including multituberculate mammals, archaic crocodiles, Archaeopteryx, pterosaurs, as well as early species of cycads and even primitive angiosperms, went extinct millions of years ago. Is it significant that even Pangea and the climatic conditions that prevailed on Earth during the "Age of Dinosaurs" no longer exist? Think about what the judges may wish to know about the educational or research value of studying the dinos out of the Mesozoic context in which they thrived--wouldn't the clones just be crocodile or bird hybrids? How real or artificial would the clones really be and how natural or unnatural the environments into which they would be placed? For a variety of reasons, you're reconciled--sadly--to convincing the judges that cloning dinosaurs is unlikely to produce significant scientific or educational results.