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Jurassic Park By: Ashlyn Shellhammer. Jurassic Park.
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Jurassic Park • Jurassic Park is a 1993 science fiction thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. The film centers on the fictional island of Isla Nublar, where scientists have created an amusement park of cloned dinosaurs. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) invites a group of scientists, played by Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblumand Laura Dern, to inspect the park prior to its public opening. Sabotage sets the dinosaurs loose, and the technicians and visitors attempt to escape the island.
Jurassic ParkQuestion 1 • Did the raptors in Jurassic Park III actually exist, and if so when? Also, were they as intelligent as the movie suggests? Were there "raptors"? Yes, there was a group of animals called dromaeosaurs which included animals such as Velociraptor. Velociraptor was actually much smaller than the "velociraptors" in the movie; it was about the size of a medium-sized dog (75 lbs. or so). But there were big dromaeosaurs roughly the size of the movie "raptors."
Jurassic ParkQuestion 2 • Could we really bring back dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park? No, sadly not. It would make paleontologists' work so much easier, more exciting, and better funded if we could, but we can't. Why? Dinosaurs (except birds) are extinct. Extinction is permanent! Even with modern species that go extinct, we have little, if any, chance of resurrecting them. Several reasons:
Jurassic ParkAnswers • 1. We must find intact DNA of the species in question. Amber is one of the better preservatives of DNA, so dinosaur DNA in amber would be good. Problem: DNA degrades over time, even in amber. After several million years, many lethal losses of pieces of the DNA would occur. These gaps in the DNA strand cannot be repaired; their information is lost forever. We cannot improvise the genetic code of an organism.
Jurassic ParkAnswers • 2. We must extract the DNA from the amber. If the DNA is inside of an insect, there would be the huge problem of getting insect DNA mixed with our dino-DNA. We would be lucky to get a few pieces of intact DNA out; certainly not the whole genome of the animal.
Jurassic ParkAnswers • 4. If we somehow got a whole dinosaur genome, we would somehow have to make it assemble into chromosomes, which we don't know how to do with dinosaur DNA. That might be able to be accomplished with a few decades of work.
Jurassic ParkAnswers • 5. These chromosomes now would have to be implanted into a compatible, living, intact egg. Crocodile eggs, or even eggs of the same dinosaur genus, would not work. In vertebrates, the same (or at least closely related) species' egg and cytoplasm apparently are required for the egg to develop normally. The major problem here is that we just have the DNA — we don't know what species we have (DNA doesn't come with nametags), and even if we did we don't have a living dinosaur egg of that species!
Jurassic ParkFinal Step • Finally, this fairy tale egg would have to be raised under the optimal conditions for that species' development, which we have little chance of inferring. If we managed to hatch our dinosaur, we would then have the monumental task of keeping it alive — it would be entering a world full of germs and other dangers to which it had no resistance. Our world is empty of the food and environment that dinosaurs were used to. Even on a tropical island, dinosaurs would sicken and die eventually. Our world has changed a lot in 65 million years.
