Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the
Los Angeles Times;
television segments on ABC TV's
Good
Morning America,
the CBS
Evening News,
and BBC TV; articles in
Time
and
Newsweek;
and dozens of stories in newspapers and maga-
zines, on radio shows across North America, Europe, Japan, and
Latin America. In all, Elizabeth estimated that this tsunami of
media attention inundated about 100 million people.
All the attention was great, but some of the coverage was com-
pletely unanticipated. A few days after our announcement, for exam-
ple,
The Daily Show,
a parody of the nightly television news on the
Comedy Central network, surprised us all with their interpretation of
our discovery. They suggested that what we had really found was
the world's oldest known abortion clinic. Another one of our favorite
accounts appeared in one of the tabloids. The paper had printed pic-
tures of our eggs and the embryonic dinosaur skin and quoted a fic-
titious paleontologist, who claimed he had discovered living embryos
of the giant sauropods, which he was now incubating. Eventually,
when they hatched, he said, he intended to set up a game preserve
where they could grow up and reproduce—a real Jurassic Park. We
wish the report had been accurate, but it was clearly an exercise in
science fiction rather than science. Nonetheless, similar questions
arose during many of our interviews, which was not surprising given
all the recent advances in cloning and the popularity of
Jurassic
Park
—both the novel and the movie.
Let us take a moment to address this issue here. In the movie
Juras-
sic Park,
numerous kinds of extinct dinosaurs are brought back to life
by reactivating the genes of these dinosaurs after the genes have
been recovered from the bodies of mosquitoes or other bloodsucking
insects preserved in amber. The scientists extract the dinosaur blood
horn the fossilized insects, separate the dinosaur DNA, which contains
the genes, from the blood, and use that to re-create the dinosaurs. But
how realistic is this scenario in light of science's recent success in
cloning sheep, mice, and even monkeys?
It is undeniably true that many kinds of small fossil animals and
plants can be preserved in amber, which is simply sap from ancient
trees that has been buried in the earth for millions of years and has
hardened into a yellowish, clear solid. Insects are one of the most
common kinds of animals to be found in amber, because they became
trapped in the sticky sap while foraging for food. Amber is an unusu-
