The Jurassic Park franchise has never exactly been praised for its scientific accuracy. Even its core concept – the idea dinosaur DNA could be preserved in amber in the first place – is something of a stretch; the preserving properties of amber have limits, and any DNA contained within amber for 65 million years would have inevitably degraded.
But Jurassic World Dominion takes the pseudoscience in a totally new direction, exploring themes such as human cloning and further advancements in genetic engineering.
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Maisie was introduced as the first human clone in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, but real-world science is a long way away from this kind of breakthrough. Although it’s not difficult to clone a human embryo, it’s difficult to safely implant a cloned fetus. Many embryos expire before they can be safely implanted, some result in miscarriages, and the ones that make it to term tend to possess notable birth defects and are not long-lived. These are the kind of risks scientists are happier to take with sheep than they are with people, and they mean there won’t be any human clones like Maisie anytime soon.
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Owen’s pet velociraptor, Blue, has a smaller role in Jurassic World Dominion than previous instalments – but an important one nonetheless. It seems Blue has had a baby, which everyone believed to be impossible – with the exception of Dr. Henry Wu, who apparently predicted it somehow. This is theoretically possible among lizards, through a process called parthenogenesis in which young can be produced from unfertilized eggs when no mate is available for a protracted period. While parthenogenesis is uncommon among species related to dinosaurs in evolutionary terms such as birds – eggs produced through parthenogenesis rarely hatch – gaps in the dinosaurs’ DNA were filled with other species, potentially making parthenogenesis more likely. As Ian Malcolm put it when referring to a different process of dinosaur reproduction in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”
