The Jurassic Park and World franchise tells the story of dinosaurs brought-to-life in
the perfect marriage of genetics, paleontology and Jeffrey Goldblum.
But does the science check out?
Can we clone a T-rex or bring a raptor back from extinction?
Can we actually make a dinosaur?
Let's find out!
Before we get to the real science, let's make a quick review of how you bring dinosaurs back to life
in the fantasy world of Jurassic Park and world.
It goes a little something like this:
Find super old mosquitos preserved in amber. Extract the blood of dinosaurs they fed on.
Supplement missing segments with frog DNA. Put it all together in an ostrich or emu egg.
Wait 'til the little critters hatch. And make a bunch of movies where each and every
time the dinosaurs run wild and folks get killed because hey, "Life finds a way."
So long as Newman and his evil wheeze don't spoil things, you're in business! ("Newman!")
What's so hard about that?
Let's take a look in six elements.
Mosquitoes - Did they live with dinosaurs?
Turns out there really were mosquitoes or mosquito-like bugs back in the day.
And when we say 'back in the day' we're talking 65 million years ago,
scientists estimate of "When dinosaurs ruled the earth."
Mosquitoes feed on whatever's around (including reptiles), so sure, it makes sense
that they would blood from a dinosaur.
So far, so good.
Number two.
Could petrified tree resin preserve DNA for millions of years?
Probably not.
And by that we mean no.
The transformation from liquid resin to solid amber is thought to take thousands of years,
and involves dehydration, intense pressure and temperature fluctuations.
None of these are really friendly to fragile DNA molecules.
Meanwhile, enzymes in the dead mosquito start breaking its body down right away.
These same enzymes will also break any apart dino DNA found in the gut.
For these and other reasons, scientists have yet to find any DNA in amber.
So, while amber DOES protect the shape and husk of an insect, and looks pretty cool
on a cane, it doesn't have magical preservative powers for DNA.
And "Amber" as a name has seen a sharp decline in popularity ever since the first movie came out.
Which probably has to mean something.
But don't just blame Amber.
The biggest challenge to finding dinosaur DNA is by far the sheer age involved.
DNA doesn't just keep on existing outside of a live host for very long.
And 65 million years is a ridiculously long time for anything to remain intact.
One study put the half-life of DNA in bone at just 521 years, meaning every 521 years
half of the bonds that hold DNA together will break.
Then half again after that, and half again after that.
Before long you're left with useless fragments.
DNA isn't just a short molecule, either.
It's an incredibly long chain, sometimes billions of bits of information in length.
It's the order these bits appear in that determines DNA's instructions: how to build a dinosaur,
make a plant, grow a Chris Pratt and so forth.
If half of the connections break every 500 years,
things get impossibly messy real quick.
Even under ideal conditions--even if you froze DNA and kept a close eye on it,
this molecule might last one-and-a-half million years.
But... that's it!
Consider that the oldest usable DNA ever recovered
is from this 700,000 year-old horse,
which sounds really old.
But dinosaurs would be nearly 100 times older.
Let's pretend that somehow we did a mostly complete get a mostly-complete set of dinosaur DNA.
We can just fill in the incomplete gaps using frog DNA like they do in the movie, right?
Not quite.
One of the problems is we'd first need to know what 'complete' looks like.
Every species we know of has its own unique arrangement and size of genetic code
called a "Genome." And we can graph genomes on this handy chart.
Humans and Jeffrey Goldblum have about three-and-a-third billion bits of information,
split into 46 sections called "chromosomes."
A brown bear has two-and-a-third billion base pairs carried on 74 chromosomes.
A frog is here. A shark here. And a whole bunch of other plants and animals, including the pineapple.
Point is there's no "one-size-fits-all" genetic code.
So finding just part of a dinosaur's genome doesn't get us very far.
There's no way to tell what's missing, or rather how much is missing.
Does this dinosaur fit here or here? Doe it have 8 or 80 chromosomes?
You can't do much without knowing how many pieces there are and how they fit together.
It'd be like filming a movie without a script.
("It is the external wounds which heal the quickest.")
True story though: Since we won't ever have dinosaur DNA because it's way too old,
some scientists think the best way forward is to evolve one of dinosaurs descendants,
a chicken, backwards to find clues.
So, if you think your job's weird, well you haven't applied enough places.
("I believe you have my stapler?")
A second problem with blending frog and dinosaur has to do with complexity.
Splicing DNA from one organism into another is very difficult but possible.
It's called 'Recombinant DNA' or 'Biomolecular Engineering.'
And it's brought us such wonders as: Human growth hormone, human insulin,
golden rice and better tasting cheese.
But these success stories involve comparatively simple transformations:
modifying or replacing small chunks of DNA in just one or two locations.
We know rice and Vitamin A very well, perform a little magic in a lab ("Fool of a Took!")
and poof, you've got golden rice.
What's proposed in Jurassic Park is infinitely more complex.
"Say again?" "We have a T-rex!"
Take one-of-a-kind incomplete DNA
from a virtually unknown and literally extinct species we've never studied or seen in the flesh,
then patch in DNA from a totally different species.
This sort of wizardry is generations removed from our current abilities.
It makes for great sci-fi movies but will probably always be impossible.
Forget all of that and say we actually have a complete set of dino DNA.
Now all we need is a host to grow it in.
Would ostrich or emu egg work? Probably not.
For one thing, dinosaur eggs came in many shapes and sizes.
Some species eggs' were round, others long and skinny.
Some were as big as a volleyball, others tennis ball size.
These birds hatch from their egg after 40 or 50 days
but dinosaurs are thought to take two to four times that long.
So your little guy's gonna run out of food or space or both he's fully grown.
Another problem happens microscopically.
An ostrich egg--like every other kind of egg--is hard-wired to help a particular embryo develop.
In this case an ostrich egg is expecting to host an ostrich.
When you put something else in there instead, like say a chicken, the teeny, tiny structures
that allow nutrition to move from the egg into the embryo don't form right.
Cells starve for energy and your embryo dies.
All of this is to say that even having a complete set of dinosaur DNA isn't enough to grow a dinosaur.
It's very likely you'd also need an actual, authentic, fresh-from-its-mom dinosaur egg.
And if we're having a hard time scraping together a couple molecules of DNA from back in the day,
there's no way we're going to find a viable dinosaur egg.
Jurassic Park is easily the best dinosaur movie ever made.
And the possibility of bringing these animals back from extinction is incredibly exciting!
But there are a lot of obstacles to this, the biggest of which is probably
the sheer age of DNA involved.
We don't have any original dinosaur DNA, we never will,
and anyone who says otherwise is selling you a load of dinosaur...
"Dino... droppings? Droppings?"
Why do you love Jurassic Park?
What's your 'spirt dinosaur'?
How would you caption this Ian Malcom pose?
What movie should we review next?
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