Is Jurassic Park Really Possible?

Readers beware: the following post may completely and irrecoverably smash your hopes and dreams.

Amber. It’s like a phone booth, or a police box, or a DeLorean, or a map of time holes:
its time-travelling capability for living beings is entirely fictional.

So, Are There Going to Be Dinosaurs on This Dinosaur Tour?

Since ancient times, people have regarded amber as magical. They carved it into talismans, adorned their shrines with it, and regarded it as worth more than gold. Ancient Greek natural philosophers hypothesized it was fossilized sunlight (they weren’t far wrong) and observed its ability to store a static electric charge—their word for amber, “elektronikos,” survives in modern English as “electronics” thanks to that shocking property. In 1989, Michael Crichton used its magic as a time machine to create Jurassic Park, his classic novel about cloned “dinosaurs” run amok on an isolated island near Costa Rica.

The greatest challenge to any writer wanting to write a plausible dinosaur tale is that 66 million year gap between classic dinosaurs and humans, but by using his background in genetics and applying some ingenuity to the normally dry-as-dust scientific literature of the time, Crichton deftly jumped that gap in a way nobody had anticipated before. The amber macguffin played neatly into Crichton’s trademark use of verisimilitude to make his novels more compelling—in his words:

“A lot of my work has to do with ideas of verisimilitude, of encouraging readers to believe what isn’t true. If you have that focus as a writer, then to write about dinosaurs in a modern-day setting is very difficult, because it is inherently unbelievable. You’re fighting disbelief every sentence of the way. So it’s a tremendous psychological campaign to do a book that will cause an otherwise rational adult to buy your premise for the few hours it will take to read it. No one’s going to believe that there are dinosaurs, really, so it can only be a kind of an enjoyable suspension of disbelief. Without that, it doesn’t matter what your message is or who your characters are—nothing matters because people won’t believe it. So the first thing was to make compelling dinosaurs, and that had a lot to do with how they were conceived and how they behaved and how they were introduced and talked about. That was my overriding concern.”

In this case, Crichton’s clever use of verisimilitude has kept people wondering whether such a cloning project might not viably produce a living dinosaur, and that’s a testament to his skill as a storyteller. He was so good at it, in fact, that many of us have had a hard time telling his fiction apart from reality, even with years of scientific advances to shed more light on the subject. And that means that what I’m about to tell you might sting a little.

Sadly, cloning dinosaurs remains unquestionably impossible.

Sorry.

No, it’s not just technology, either. It’s not a “simple” matter of building better labs or computers or machines. The very nature of the enterprise in both practical and metaphysical terms presents insurmountable challenges. The recent video on our YouTube channel featured here presents a nice encapsulation of the basics; what follows in this blog post adds even more dream-shattering doses of cold, cruel reality for dinosaur aficionados, so if you want to read further (and you will, I’d wager), don your most fatalistic grin and brace yourself for a rain-drenched parade of scientific sticks in the mud.

  • Spliced end-to-end, chromosome by chromosome, DNA of the nucleus of a single human cell is a molecule some six feet or so in length, sectioned and wrapped upon itself so it can fit in something so tiny as a body cell. That makes it extremely fragile, whether we’re talking mutation during a copying procedure or whether it sits in the ground after death. It doesn’t take much to scramble the vital information needed to create a human body, even with all the junk DNA left over from viruses or left out of our natural development (more on that later) to lower the chances of wiping out the really important genetic data. While amber preserves the shape of small organisms in near-perfect detail, it can’t provide protection against the cosmic Cuisinart of background radiation pelting our planet at a sparse yet constant rate. Though Earth’s magnetic field prevents the worst of this high-energy DNA-shredding radiation—making any life at all possible on this spinning blue orb—it doesn’t keep 100% of that radiation out. Living organisms have their ways of coping with radiation’s effects if they get hit during their mayfly span of days, but dead ones don’t. ‘Cuz they’re dead. Now, add in the magnifying effect of geologic time that translates the centimeter-per-year slowness of continental drift into the breakup of Pangea and the scattering of the continents into today’s configuration, and the occasional gamma ray becomes the inevitable scrambling of ancient DNA into an illegible mess. We won’t even bother to compound that process of degradation with all the other ways that the earth’s natural processes erase the genes of ancient organisms: they would fill volumes. Suffice it, then, to say that even though we have composite genomes spliced together for a few cold-loving Pleistocene animals like the Woolly Mammoth, it’s only enough for us to study in abstract; actually putting together enough DNA to remake the animal, let alone a viable population of an entire species, is a whole other story (one I wrote about earlier this year—check it out!). As a result of all these agents of decay, experiments since the 1990s have failed to recover authenticated DNA from amber or younger but still ancient resins, though some protein traces do apparently remain. For something as old as a dinosaur, DNA just doesn’t last long enough. Neither Crichton nor the scientists of the 1980s nor the reading audience of the time had the data for determining the shelf life of paleoDNA—in fact, the popularity of Jurassic Park spurred much of the research that has now made clear how much of a pipe dream recovering ancient DNA really is.
  • Incidentally, cold is better at preserving DNA than amber. The maximum age of DNA usable for any kind of scientific endeavor is therefore limited to the age of our current permafrost, dating back about 2 million years; this time limit was postulated in a study on 1.4 million year old DNA recovered from mammoth teeth, and a 2022 study claims to have recovered 2 million year old environmental DNA from Greenland. Beyond 2 million years, DNA isn’t going to be much good even if we manage to recover it. As for studying organisms in the tropics or other prehistorically warm-weather environments, forget it.
  • Oh, and there’s another detail so tiny that most of us never give it a second thought: were there any mosquitos around to suck dinosaur blood in the first place? Mosquitos appear in the fossil record around the mid-Cretaceous, but these specimens were discovered in 2000 and 2004, and while both occur in amber, neither contain traces of blood. Two male mosquitoes with possibly blood-sucking mouthparts were also reported in 2023 and harked from early-Cretaceous Lebanese amber; this paper cites another study which used genetic evidence to estimate the origin of mosquitoes dates to the Jurassic, though whether they sucked blood at that point remains anyone’s guess. The oldest fossilized mosquito engorged with blood was reported in 2013, but it was remarkably preserved in 46-million-year-old fossilized pond- or lakebed, not amber! Scientists detected the blood inside the fossil mosquito by using spectral analysis to identify blood porphyrins, which are chemically stable blood components, but they could not directly identify blood cells, let alone extract DNA from them. At any rate, neither the Jurassic Park novel nor the movie had any foundation in the fossil record for dinosaur-sucking mosquitoes at the time of their release, though to the novel’s credit, it mentions other blood-sucking insects as well; the movie relied on the mosquito as a visual icon to relay the concepts behind dinosaur cloning in a quick and visually entertaining way, which should be taken as an example of using cultural presumptions for the sake of communication and not an attempt at a factually sound educational documentary.
  • So, mosquitos can’t provide dino DNA even if its shelf life weren’t a problem, but what about those other blood-sucking insects? As far as the fossil record reveals, a number of insect families took to Sanguinarian habits around the mid- to late Jurassic, but these have been identified by their similarities to living insect groups and details of their mouthparts, with no evidence of blood preserved in their bellies. Reports of the earliest identifiable blood meal inside a blood-sucking insect that I could find as of the time of this writing date to the Early Cretaceous and were identified by a concentration of iron found in a bug preserved in stone, like the aforementioned mosquito, not actual blood parts, and definitely nothing containing DNA. Though other blood-sucking insects of Mesozoic do occur in amber, the overall fossil record of insect hematophagy (“blood eating”) is extremely poor, and what little scientists can glean from the fossil record does not deal with extracting actual blood, but rather spectrography and radiography. Finding a known hematophagous insect does not guarantee blood of any sort in its stomach, let alone recoverable blood, and anyway THEN we’d have to find a blood cell with an intact nucleus, and THEN we’d have to extract enough DNA to clone (which has already been chopped into oblivion by the ravages of time). The fossil record is playing stingy with its blood-filled bugs—even after decades of active search, only a handful may currently exist worldwide, and among those, none of that blood is recoverable in the manner Jurassic Park describes.
  • Are the chances of a real Jurassic Park looking dismal enough yet? Read on. We’re just getting started.
It’s not a mosquito, it’s a crane fly, which doesn’t suck blood and isn’t especially closely related to mosquitoes. You’re welcome.
  • Even if it were possible to recover clonable DNA strands of classic dinosaurs, the process of initiating its development into a living dinosaur presents a whole new set of insanely complicated challenges. To name just one example: given the old saw of which came first, how could we lay a dinosaur egg without a dinosaur mother to do the laying? The novel circumvented this problem by making up a whiz-bang porous plastic suitable for the purpose, but in the real world, even decades later, we have no such substance available. That’s just one of hundreds, maybe thousands of daunting, expensive challenges to conjuring a living dinosaur from paleoDNA. For a fuller-yet-still-truncated description of the challenges of practical de-extinction, check out Part I of our blog series on the prospects of cloning Mammuthus (parts II and III are still pending—summarizing such a complicated process with such complex and potentially far-reaching ramifications naturally takes a significant investment of time!).
  • One particular problem of development deserves special attention. Though teachers and other science communicators often fall into the habit of describing DNA as the building blocks or the blueprint for creating a living thing, such metaphors oversimplify how it really operates. DNA acts as a template for a cell to construct the proteins it needs to perform its various functions; to fix the metaphors, DNA is a blueprint for creating the building blocks that could make up an organism. Consider, for example, dominant and recessive genes: though someone may carry a gene for blue eyes, that doesn’t mean they will end up with blue eyes at any point in their lives. I also mentioned “junk” DNA from viruses earlier, which shows that organisms will routinely ignore DNA that doesn’t help them survive. In many ways, genotype is not the same thing as the organism’s phenotype—the physical expression of information contained in DNA, among other things. As a result, DNA’s precise role in the phenomenon of life still presents many mysteries, including exactly how and why cells “know” what genes to express, which genes to ignore, and how to order the various tasks necessary for constructing a complex organism. Therefore, without a complete knowledge of dinosaurian development and its variety among the disparate members of the clade, we cannot make a dinosaur. It ultimately wouldn’t matter if we could reliably recover an entire dinosaurian genome if we can’t get it to build everything in the right order.
  • BUT let’s say that somehow we manage to overcome every single one of those obstacles and we have a baby dinosaur squeaking in our hands; SURELY at that point we could announce success in de-extinctifying dinosaurs, right? Well, that very squeaking thing in our hands begs the penultimate question that unavoidably dooms the whole enterprise from the very start: how would we know if we got it right? What exactly would our basis for comparison be? All we would have for comparison is what we learned from the fossil record, and that knowledge by nature cannot create a picture of the original animals clear enough for a fair comparison. Simply put, we cannot know how closely the clone may or may not resemble the original dinosaur. Furthermore, the new organism would be created from ancient DNA by means of artificial interpolation, introducing the high probability that we altered something in its development somehow. In such a case, we would have to acknowledge the probability that we got it wrong one way or another, but we would be incapable of saying exactly how. The Jurassic Park novel addresses this problem directly, going so far as to pause the action early in the book and portray a conversation between John Hammond, the businessman responsible for the park, and Henry Wu, his chief geneticist, wherein Wu proposes creating a new version of the park dinosaurs more likely to meet guest expectations in behavioral terms and which would be easier to control. Hammond refuses on the basis that he doesn’t want the dinosaurs to be artificial, and Wu responds that features such as the lysine contingency have already made that a moot point. Even without the deliberate introduction of features to adapt the animals to a theme park setting, the trial-and-error nature inevitable in leading us to the hypothetical point of producing a living organism must introduce variations which did not exist in nature for the original species. Whatever organism might result, therefore, could not be safely considered a de-extinct species, but rather a recreation. Put another way, the recreated dinosauresque squeaking in our hands would be just as much paleoart as the sculptures of the Eccles Dinosaur Park, albeit living, breathing art like bonsai, topiary, or a dancer. Growing a functional, healthy organism as a fulfillment of the process is no guarantee we recreated history.
  • For that matter, given how paleontology bases dinosaur species solely upon skeletal features, we would be unable to identify our cloned dinosaur with any one of them. Sure, we could always x-ray the clone and compare its bones with those recovered from the fossil record, but this approach ignores the phenomenon of cryptic species. Consider this: biology dealing with living animals uses a species concept based on organic reproduction to test its classifications—if an organism is capable of producing offspring which reasonably resemble itself and which are capable of producing offspring in like manner, they all belong to one species. Yes, grandparents are proof of species. Naturally, paleontologists can’t perform such an experiment with dead things scattered in the earth for millions of years, and what’s more, even wildly different species in terms of behavior and soft tissue construction may grow nearly identical skeletons. Lions and tigers clearly belong to different species even without applying the biological species test (though they don’t readily hybridize, either), but even anatomical experts have a hard time telling their bones apart. A recent study on the genetics of dire wolves found that they may present an even better example, considering that even though their skeletons very closely resemble those of timber wolves, genetically their ancestors diverged from the timber wolf line 6 million years ago! That would place them well outside the Canis genus. These examples illustrate the mismatch between species concepts and the problems it would create for something as simple as identifying our clone dinosaur as any known species.
  • On top of that, consider how the fossil record preserves only a fraction of the dinosaurs that ever lived; the DNA we recover and clone may not match anything with fossil bones known to science. As a result, we could very well sabotage any objective attempt to clone what we find by assuming that it belongs to a known species based only on a set of fossil bones. To illustrate, we could assume our DNA belongs to Velociraptor when it really belongs to an entirely undiscovered species, and by using Velociraptor as a template, we could create an entirely made up organism that looks like neither the original Velociraptor nor the original unnamed dinosaur species. To quote Ian Malcolm from the film, “You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it.” Our systems of scientific classification simply haven’t anticipated de-extinction (because conceptually it’s either impossible or a misnomer), but they do have important uses and do make a difference when it comes to putting them to practical application.
  • Whether on purpose or not, the Jurassic Park novel also alludes to this problem with its Velociraptors, which it identifies as belonging to the species antirrhopus. There is no such combination in the scientific literature—it was only ever an informal proposal made in a pop-science book called Predatory Dinosaurs of the World and was never officially accepted by the ICZN (a scientific organization which referees the classification of species). By utilizing the taxonomic opinion of a single author which scientists never accepted (and which was later rejected even by that author), the book reinforces the disconnect between science and the recreations that the scientists of Jurassic Park produced. Other clues throughout the novel make this disconnect a running motif, such as using nicknames (“Trikes,” “Othys,” and “Compys,” for example), giving the Velociraptors abilities unlikely for any dinosaur like sex switching and chameleon-like color changing, and the aforementioned version numbers portrayed as a part of the park’s tracking system. By the way, using the species name antirrhopus explains claims that the Velociraptors of Jurassic Park really portray Deinonychus, a one-species genus with the full binomial combination of Deinonychus antirrhopus.
  • Okay, so we can’t revive ancient DNA, but what if we could reactivate the classically dinosaurian features of their living descendants, the birds (as mentioned in our YouTube video)? Well, we could probably learn some interesting things we wouldn’t be able to learn otherwise, but even if we attempted to hatch and raise to adulthood such a dino-bird experiment, it would still fall under all the problems of meeting the impossible standards of artificial de-extinction. Genetically, if we used a chicken as the basis for the experiment, it would still be a chicken, just one with a bunch of atavisms introduced into its phenotype—a dino-chicken is just a differently-shaped chicken, but a chicken nonetheless. The experiment could not produce the dinosaurian ancestor of birds even if we had some basis for comparison. Besides, evolution does overwrite traits over time—that’s why mammal DNA has “forgotten” how to make more than two sets of teeth—so any dino-chicken must necessarily feature holes in its genotype. It might kinda sorta look like what we’d expect a dinosaur to look like (there’s that paleoart angle again), but it would be a new creation, not a species revived from extinction.
  • One tangent before we wrap up: a number of online sources and reviews of the various Jurassic Park media hazard the argument that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park should reflect “scientific accuracy,” though they rarely specify what they mean by accuracy other than mentioning feathers, lips, and wrist posture on theropods. Though they rarely explain in detail why anyone should hold Jurassic Park to such a standard, the general implication is that it’s because of its enormous influence over pop culture’s vision of what a dinosaur is and what it looks like. They seem to think that because this franchise wields such power as a media platform, it comes under obligation to reflect a very specific view of science which they happen to subscribe to. For whatever reason, in the process of forwarding this point they somehow manage to ignore and expect others to ignore glaring features of the story that make it a clear critique of science, its methodology and its power, especially when that power is wielded by those who don’t understand science. How anyone could ignore Ian Malcolm as a character and the long sections of his arguments and philosophizing, often unopposed or ineffectively opposed by other characters, is beyond my comprehension. Sometimes others will point out to them that the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are mutants and therefore not real dinosaurs, and they’ll simply reiterate, often more forcefully, their claim that current year science (as they see it) must take precedence over everything else, dismissing observations of the JP dinosauresques’ artificiality as “cop-outs.” People are, of course, welcome to their opinions; such a position, however, misreads the story on a fundamental level, and fails to make a salient point in terms of analysis and persuasion. Each iteration of the tale holds in common, among other things, a critique of employing scientific power without understanding its full ramifications in detail. The creatures of Jurassic Park are fundamentally monsters in the same vein as Frankenstein’s creation, not animals resurrected from the past. Not only are they mutants, they’re artificial recreations laden with all the baggage of our incomplete knowledge and arrogant blindness to the nature of that knowledge, and that makes them fundamentally different from the group of creatures that evolved about 240 million years ago and went extinct about 66 million years ago. They would be OUR brainchild, not Nature’s. Having the characters call them dinosaurs at all is an intentional irony that shows the idea of dinosaurs—and symbolically the idea of science—is often more important to people than the reality of dinosaurs, whether that disconnect leads to malicious or innocuous consequences. Attempting to make them “accurate” to current year hypotheses or correcting them to reflect discoveries made since the late 80s/early 90s ignores the intentional decisions these stories make to blend blatant inaccuracy (poison-spitting Dilophosaurus, tree-climbing Othnelia, Velociraptor antirrhopus) with verisimilitude to create a nuanced critique of science and power. The story doesn’t work if the dinosaurs are portrayed as totally accurate to the ideas of any given set of hypotheses, historical period, or expert opinion—we need to see the flaws of Jurassic Park’s scientists if the novel is to succeed in helping us recognize the flaws in our own science, especially paleontology. The story itself thereby also indicts proponents of making the franchise a cheerleader of idealistic scientific progressivism, which probably drives their desire to change it—like John Hammond, they want the power without regard to the responsibility, whether they’re conscious of it or not. Like other examples of the sci-fi genre, Jurassic Park and its spinoffs work best by blending science with fiction, and in doing so often portray the downsides of science as well as its wonders. Science fiction is supposed to be inaccurate (well, artfully so)! Likewise, playing John Hammond and insisting on achieving the impossible standard of “real dinosaurs” even in the milieu of the story is a bad idea with deceptively dangerous consequences—science doesn’t work that way, the novel itself doesn’t work that way, and pretending that they do is likely to come back and bite people in the end.

Has this post shattered some dreams? If so, consider this: no matter whether the impossibility of reviving dinosaurs invokes disappointment or relief, it firmly and permanently places Jurassic Park in the realm of fiction. Does that make Jurassic Park any less of a classic? Well, does the fictional nature of the Force make Star Wars less compelling? Does the fictional nature of Klingons and Vulcans make Star Trek less compelling? Science fiction never needed to be literal to be real in the only sense that counts: its ability to help people explore facets of the universe our human limitations normally deny us. Like the imaginary number used for solving quadratic equations, its ordered impossibility is the thing that makes it useful and valuable at all. Indeed, our ability to conceptualize and think through impossibilities forms a centerpiece in our human suite of survival advantages. That so many people still question whether or not we could clone dinosaurs doesn’t accuse us of foolishness. Quite the opposite, in fact: we dream like this because we’re intelligent. And if we dream, well, we discover—who knows what we’ll dig up as we test our dreams against physical reality? Those “dumb” enough to try . . . eventually. With all that said, though, as important as it is to dream, living a dream to the exclusion of reality or confusing the dream for reality rarely ends well. We can better understand that truth by conjuring dinosaurs from their extinction in our imaginations while we spend time between the covers of a book or the darkness of a movie theater or, ahem, exploring certain museums and sculpture parks. We’re simply not going to revive dinosaurs by trying to extract blood from Mesozoic amber!

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