Buzz
Jurassic Park celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and a 3D version of the film is now showing in theaters nationwide. We reached out to Riley Black, a science writer with expertise in evolution, paleontology, and natural history, to share thoughts on the film's premise—that dinosaurs are cloned from DNA extracted from mosquitoes.
As a child fascinated by dinosaurs, I dreamed of having one as a pet. An Apatosaurus would have been the perfect choice—large and impressive, but not too likely to eat me. Unfortunately, that dream will remain unrealized. While I wish I could say otherwise, science tells us that the idea of a real-life Jurassic Park is impossible due to insurmountable obstacles.
Time is a crucial factor. The last of the non-avian dinosaurs—the incredible creatures that still captivate us in museums and in our imaginations—went extinct 66 million years ago. This gap in time is so vast that it's hard for us to truly grasp its enormity, and we lost any opportunity we might have had to clone dinosaurs shortly after the end of the Cretaceous mass extinction.
This isn't the dinosaur DNA you're looking for...
You might have heard that paleontologist Mary Schweitzer and her team have managed to extract soft tissue remnants from Cretaceous-era dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus and the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus. While these claims have sparked debate, they can’t be dismissed outright. Schweitzer and her colleagues have made a compelling case that, in rare instances, fragments of original dinosaur protein may still exist. However, that’s not enough to bring a dinosaur back to life. The key to resurrecting a dinosaur is DNA, and sadly, DNA has a short shelf life. The chances of recovering dinosaur genetic material are virtually nonexistent.
Scientists have long known that DNA begins to break down immediately after death. Even in exceptionally well-preserved specimens from more recent history—such as woolly mammoths discovered in the frozen Arctic permafrost—the genetic material has already begun to fragment. However, it wasn’t until late last year that University of Copenhagen paleogeneticist Morten Allentoft and his team calculated the actual rate at which DNA degrades.
The Breakdown of 'Mr. DNA'
By studying the bones of recently-extinct avian dinosaurs, specifically the 8000- to 600-year-old remains of the giant, flightless moa birds that once roamed New Zealand, researchers determined that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. This is longer than anticipated, but still far too short to recover DNA from creatures like Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops (let alone more ancient species such as Brachiosaurus and Dilophosaurus). Even in optimal conditions, where bones are kept dry and chilled at temperatures of 23°F or lower, the entire genome of a creature would be destroyed within 6.8 million years—nearly 59 million years before the last non-avian dinosaurs disappeared.
It’s really that simple. Without DNA, there’s no bringing back a Velociraptor. (Though I’m not sure whether that’s a good or bad thing.) And the whole idea of extracting dinosaur blood from amber? That wouldn’t work either.
Let’s entertain the idea for a moment that the fossilized tree sap and the insect it encased somehow defy biological principles and actually contain DNA. Even then, drilling through the amber to extract the insect’s digestive contents would result in contamination—mixing genetic material from the tree, insect, and dinosaur remains together.
But for the sake of the story, let’s stretch our imagination a bit more. Imagine, through magic or some other equally impossible means, scientists manage to extract dinosaur DNA from ancient bones or some other source. That’s just the first step toward bringing a Spinosaurus back to life.
Parasaurolophus Puzzle
Any DNA from ancient dinosaurs would be fragmented, much like the genetic bits we've found from Ice Age mammoths, Neanderthals, giant sloths, and sabercats. The challenge is identifying those fragments and figuring out where they fit into the full genome. To do this, scientists need a reference from a close relative—modern Asian elephants work for mammoths, and our own genome for Neanderthals. But since living avian dinosaurs are so distantly related to creatures like Pachycephalosaurus, their DNA wouldn't be very useful in deciphering the genome of non-avian dinosaurs. And let’s not forget the pseudogenes and non-functional parts of the genome. We haven’t even fully sequenced our own genome yet—currently, we’re still around 99 percent of the functional parts—so we’re still far from being able to completely reconstruct an extinct genome.
Jurassic Park acknowledged this challenge. That’s why the fictional engineers in the story made the questionable decision to mix frog DNA with dinosaur genes to create fully-formed creatures. And I don’t call it “questionable” just because of the plot twist about “unauthorized mating” among the dinosaurs. By the time Jurassic Park was released, paleontologists had already confirmed that birds are descendants of dinosaurs—an idea brilliantly supported by the discovery of numerous feathered, fuzzy dinosaurs in the fossil record beginning in 1996. Mixing Velociraptor with bird DNA would have made much more sense, particularly given the fictional paleontologist Alan Grant’s obsession with pointing out the bird-like features of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
A Raptor By Any Other Name
So, recreating a Velociraptor or Tyrannosaurus genome wouldn't be about resurrection, but rather about reinvention. Even if we could recover dinosaur DNA, we would need to reverse-engineer the genomes based on our best guesses about their anatomy and behavior. And that's just the beginning of the challenges.
Creating a complete DNA profile gets us nowhere if those genetic instructions can’t be translated into a viable embryo that can develop into a full-grown organism. Michael Crichton and the film adaptations of his work conveniently skipped over this crucial detail, especially since cloning birds is beyond our current capabilities. It's one thing to say, “We’ll place an artificial nucleus into an ostrich egg, and everything else will just work out,” but that overlooks the complex biological processes needed to form a living, growing creature. Since birds nurture their offspring externally, we might not even be able to successfully clone a bird, let alone a dinosaur—even if we had all the necessary components. It would be like gathering all the ingredients for a cake and turning on the oven, but not knowing the chemistry that turns those ingredients into a delicious finished product.
A real Jurassic Park will never exist. But I’m not particularly disappointed by that. While our favorite dinosaurs may never be resurrected in a literal sense, paleontologists are discovering more and more about their lives by examining what remains of these ancient creatures. Science continues to fuel our imagination, keeping dinosaurs alive at the intersection of fossil facts and creative speculation. We can still dream of dinosaurs.
Brian Switek made an admirable attempt to keep things light in this post. That didn't quite work out. He shares his enthusiasm for fossil discoveries on his National Geographic blog Laelaps, and in his books Written in Stone and My Beloved Brontosaurus, out this month. Although the mighty “Brontosaurus” was disproven by science over a century ago, its legacy remains alive. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, Brian traces the history of the beloved sauropod to explore how scientific advancements have reshaped our understanding of dinosaurs over the last thirty years, transforming familiar Mesozoic creatures into beings more extraordinary than we ever imagined. He resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, to be closer to the fossilized wonders that inspire his writing.
