
Tick Wrapped in Spider Silk Found Trapped in Amber - sohkamyung
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/fossils-ticks-spiders-dinosaurs-amber-cretaceous-science/
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esaym
Funny. Dinosaurs evolved into birds and alligators but the tick is still a
tick??

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edmccard
Yep. And the shark is still a shark, and the horseshoe crab is still a
horseshoe crab...

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joering2
Yep. Humans supposedly envolved from monkeys sharing 99% of DNA; yet as of
today monkeys still give birth to monkeys, not humans.

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siidooloo
Why would a monkey give birth to a human?

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dontJudge
They wouldn't give birth to a human. Just another monkey with a mutation that
may (or may not) give it an advantage to survive long enough to reproduce.
Over several hundred generations you can get a very different animal.

A good example is dogs. Humans controlled their breeding to promote certain
attributes. Resulting in new types of animals that never existed in the wild.

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Giorgi
all I care about is if we are getting Jurrasic park or not?

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tristanj
No chance. DNA has a half life of ~521 years [1] and any sample older than a
few million years old will be too degraded to extract meaningful information.

[https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-
life-1.1...](https://www.nature.com/news/dna-has-a-521-year-half-life-1.11555)

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agumonkey
nah, just throw some ML inference and pray that most of their DNA was unused
or secondary :p

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tristanj
No, the article clearly explains why that won't work. DNA is not a long-term
stable molecule. After millions of years the source material will be damaged
beyond repair. Machine learning is not some magic band aid that solves
impossible problems.

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jonhendry18
Good

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nickthemagicman
Can you give evidence for this assertion? I feel like it could contain some
type of supervirus which may wipe out the human race. I feel like Zombie
overthrow would be bad.

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jonhendry18
Just on principle I like to see a tick that died badly.

