Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
This problem was fancifully solved in
Jurassic Park
by placing the
dinosaur DNA inside an egg cell of a female crocodile. This makes a
bit of evolutionary sense because the crocodile is the closest living rel-
ative of extinct dinosaurs, except for birds. It would have made even
more sense to stick the dinosaur DNA inside the egg cell of a female
ostrich, but even this wouldn't have worked. Not enough is known
about what triggers and controls an embryo's growth and birth to
successfully duplicate an animal that has been extinct for 65 million
years.
So our chances of re-creating an extinct dinosaur are not good. In
fact, there is realistically no chance at all. Could that change in the
future? Perhaps... in the far distant future, but many momentous sci-
entific breakthroughs would have to be made to do so. Realistically,
those breakthroughs are impossible for us to envision and, in all
probability, will never occur. Molecular biologists and paleontolo-
gists are constantly asked whether extinct dinosaurs can be cloned. As
our press conference demonstrated, reporters often like to probe
endlessly, trying to force us to admit that the possibility exists. After
extensive badgering, when one of the museum's scientists was asked
whether he thought there was just a slight chance of this all eventu-
ally coming to pass, he thought for a second and exasperatedly
replied, "Yeah, and someday monkeys might fly out of my butt, too."
Naturally, we hope, for our colleague's sake, that the chances of that
occurrence are, indeed, equally low—even in the years to come.
Although many scientists would have offered a more politically correct
answer, his response reflected the overwhelming consensus among sci-
entists that an actual Jurassic Park is unlikely to become a reality.
Having survived the media blitz, our thoughts once again turned
to the field. Our initial investigations had raised many other biologic
and geologic questions that we would have to solve to compile a com-
plete picture of the events preceding and following the catastrophe,
and we wouldn't be able to find those answers with the evidence we
had in the lab.
