There are quite a few things about the movie Jurassic Park that aren’t very scientific. (Like the fact that velociraptors were actually about the size of chickens). But one intriguing aspect of both the film and novel is its very plausible-sounding premise. In the movie, scientists managed to clone dinosaurs by finding dinosaur blood within mosquitoes that had been fossilized in amber. They then used the DNA in the blood to clone the dinosaurs for their park.
In real life, alas, even the very premise of Jurassic Park turns out to be false. That’s the conclusion of a group of scientists at the University of Manchester, who’ve put the nail in the coffin of the idea that dinosaur DNA can be extracted from insects in amber.
Read the full, original story here: Scientists Show That Jurassic Park-Style Dinosaur Cloning Couldn’t Happen
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Additional Resources:
- “DNA has a 521-year half-life,” Nature
- “Absence of Ancient DNA in Sub-Fossil Insect Inclusions Preserved in ‘Anthropocene’ Colombian Copal,” PLoS One
- “700,000-Year-Old Horse Genome Shatters Record for Sequencing of Ancient DNA,” Wired
