The 1993 film ‘Jurassic Park’ pivots around the central idea that ancient dinosaur DNA can be extracted from fossilized mosquitoes preserved in amber.  As shown in the flow chart below, it assumes that, after sucking blood from a passing dinosaur, prehistoric mosquitoes became trapped in tree resin and then preserved, retaining that dinosaur blood and thus dino-DNA in their guts.  The tree resin solidified and, after millions of years, hardened over time to form pieces of amber – time capsules containing perfectly preserved dinosaur DNA.

 

Those clever scientists, under the guidance of David Attenborough’s brother,

then extract that DNA and use it as a genetic blueprint to clone a living

dinosaur.  In fact, not just one dinosaur species, but lots of them, from the

tiny Compsognathus the size of a large chicken, to the gigantic Brachiosaur. 

And all from one fossilised mosquito!  That mosquito must have fed, in quick

succession, on lots of different species of dinosaurs (in order to contain all

their DNA), and those scientists must have been amazing to disentangle the

multitude of DNAstrands into the separate species!  The flow chart I have

constructed on thenext page shows the steps involved in recreating a dinosaur,

 according to the film.

 

Everybody, aged from 4 to 104, loves a dinosaur; those almost mythical and alien creatures that, almost        unbelievably, roamed this world all those millennia ago.  The first dinosaurs were thought to have appeared                                          about 230 million years ago (the middle Triassic).  They were the dominant                                                      terrestrial vertebrates through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, before mass                                          extinction at the close of the cretaceous 65 million years ago.  In fact, these                                                    beasts were at their zenith in the Cretaceous period (see the geological timeline                                              for more details), but ‘Jurassic Park’ has a decidedly better ring  to it than                                                        ‘Cretaceous Park’!  Indeed, the dinosaurs of the Jurassic period were mostly                                                   herbivores (the sauropods such as the Brachiosaurs), and the large, hunting, carnivorous dinosaurs, that are so beloved of the film, lived in the Cretaceous.  Take, for example, the scary T-Rex which features heavily in the movie.  They lived in the late Cretaceous, so you could say that Stephen Spielberg got his periods mixed up.  The table on the following page illustrates where the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods fit into the geological timescale and demonstrates just how ancient fossils from these periods are relative to current life on earth (Quarternary period) – I will return to the importance of this point further on when discussing the half-life of DNA.

 

I am sorry to say, however, that during my research for this project, I have found that the basic premise for the film, outlined above, is riddled with holes.  On the flow chart, a red dot signifies one or more problems that would be encountered using the Jurassic Park method to recreate a dinosaur. 

 

 In the immortal words of Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music, ‘Let’s start at the very beginning’.