Could it be possible for a dinosaur carcase to have been trapped in ice and then thrown into space by a large meteor impact?


Say the leg of a TRex trapped in ice somewhere out near mars?

Possible? Sure, why not? A meteor could have just clipped a glacier. Bu't I don't think that's very likely, and I don't think there would be much left in the way of DNA. It tends to decay over time. Your dino meat would have be be encased in enough material to protect it from radiation and be in an orbit that would keep it at very low temperature. Most improbable. But then, if you want some dinosaur DNA, don't worry. The aliens who took them plan to return them any day now.

I think, also, that any impact with enough energy to hurl an ice-encased piece of dino into space would quite probably also (a) melt and / or shatter the ice, and (b) destroy the dino tissue. Flinging rocks and other items into space from the surface of a planet as large as Earth is quite a violent process.

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I think there's another problem with the dinosaursickle idea. My impression is that for most of the period the dinosaurs were around the Earth's average temperature was somewhat higher than it is now, so there may not have been very many glaciers around for dinosaurs to get trapped in. While they were around for a long time and there may have been exceptionally cold periods, I still don't think the odds are very good on this.

And while it may be that the aliens are bringing back some dinosaur DNA for us, but given how long its been and how much of a data storage problem they've had in the last 100 million years, there is a significant change that they'll bring us the wrong dinosaurs (oh, you mean you didn't have the fire-breathing variety? Sorry about that.)

DK

No data storage problem. They just loaded them up all the dinosaurs, zipped them off at relavistic speed, (the exhaust of their ship left a big crater in Mexico) put them on display for freaky week at the zoo and are now zipping them back at relavistic speed and they should turn up at any moment. They'll probably be quite hungry when they arrive.

Isn't that already what happened? You know, back in those medieval days with all those dragons.

History channel did have a show about the origin of dragons. It was quite easy to believe that people found dinosaur bones and imagined dragons. But where did the fire-breathing come from? Not to mention the 4 limbs plus wings equals 6 appendages.

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Actualy medievil dragons for the most part appeared quite small compared to what we're used to from the movies. (Although some were big.) When you look at art work of Saint George and the Dragon it sometimes looks like George is killing the love child of a bat and a big lizard.

forget the ice part for a bit and think about other things, tar pits, stand alone animals.

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I think that studying ancient chunks of rock that were knocked off the earth and could still be littering the solar system might be an excellent way to find evidence of what the first life on earth was like. Maybe if we're really lucky we'll find a chunk of earth on earth that spent a few billion years wandering around in space.

Let's pretend this highly unlikely event actually took place. The radiation from the sun would quickly fry away any DNA since a meteor in space would have nothing protect it from the many varaites of radiation it would be exposed too. We have enough trouble finding dino DNA here on earth where it would be must better protected.