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Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Jurassic Park - The Reality

Dinosaur

Jurassic Park touches on some real science, but cloning actual dinosaurs is not possible with today’s technology — and might never be.

Here’s why:


🧬 The DNA Problem

Cloning requires intact DNA, but:

  • DNA degrades over time, especially over tens of millions of years.

  • Dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago.

  • The oldest DNA ever recovered (from mammoths or horses) is less than 1 million years old.

  • Even preserved in amber (like in the movie), no usable dinosaur DNA has ever been found.

So, we have no complete dinosaur DNA to clone from.


🐓 Birds Are Modern Dinosaurs

Interestingly, birds are the direct descendants of some dinosaurs. Scientists can:

  • Compare bird DNA with what little fossilized proteins or fragments exist.

  • Try "reverse engineering" bird genomes to express ancient traits (like tails or teeth), but that’s more genetic modification than cloning.

A famous example is the “chickenosaurus” concept — tweaking chicken DNA to bring out dino-like traits.


🧪 Cloning Itself Has Limits

Even if we had perfect dino DNA:

  • We'd still need a closely related living species to use as a surrogate mother.

  • Birds are the closest, but their eggs and reproduction methods are very different from dinosaurs like T. rex or raptors.

That makes gestating a cloned dinosaur extremely difficult, if not impossible.


🦖 So... Could Jurassic Park Happen?

Short answer: No — not with real dinosaurs.

But creating a Jurassic Park-like experience with genetically modified animals or robotic recreations? That’s already happening in theme parks and research centres. Some scientists are also editing modern animal DNA to create creatures that look or act like ancient ones.

So while we won’t see a real T. rex stomping around, science fiction is slowly blurring into science faction in other ways.
 
T. Rex
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model

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