The Feasibility of Jurassic Park

by Keren Luo

Jurassic Park is one of the most iconic Hollywood movies. In Steven Spielberg’s massive blockbuster, a rich man named John Hammond invests billions of dollars in cloning dinosaurs from DNA found in mosquito remains preserved in amber in order to create the eponymous Jurassic Park. He invites paleontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler and mathematician Ian Malcolm to test and review the park. While Hammond assures everyone that the park is safe, dozens of ferocious predators break free and go on the hunt.

But could the scenario depicted in Jurassic Park ever come true?

In short, no—for better or worse, Jurassic Park can never come true in real life. According to Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist who consulted for the movie, the idea of recreating dinosaurs from their DNA is problematic. “In order to clone a dinosaur you would need the whole genome,” he points out, “and nobody’s ever even found a little bit of dinosaur DNA. So we’re talking about something that’s pretty difficult, if not impossible” (Halton). DNA is a code, except instead of being 1s and 0s (base-2) like computer code, it is comprised of four base pairs (Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, Thymine). Organisms exist because their DNA has a specific length, orientation, and order. These features are the determining factors helping to distinguish between different organisms. However, when DNA leaves living cells, it begins to decompose and break apart. The genetic code of a T-Rex would be fragmented or decomposed after the T-Rex died, and without every single base pair of the DNA being preserved, it becomes worthless. Moreover, the fragmented DNA would be impossible to organize, and scientists would not be able to decipher the correct order of the DNA to create a “real” dinosaur. Finally, DNA does not last very long; it has a half-life of about 521 years (Gannon). Half-life is the time required for the radioactivity of a specified isotope to fall to half its original value; thus, after even a couple of thousand years, there is no genetic material present in DNA strands.

Some may ask, couldn’t we extrapolate whatever pieces of DNA were not recoverable? This question is intuitively sound, but birds are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, and, phenotypically, they are not very similar. Both genetic and epigenetic, or in other words, nongenetic, differences abound. With over 65 million years of divergence, a few dozen mutations per generation would leave dinosaur DNA essentially unrecognizable, rendering it impossible to plug DNA into the gaps. Currently, there seems to be some promise for extracting DNA from fossils that have been covered in certain iron sediments which have replaced proteins and protected the DNA. However, this is new information that has come to light in just the last year or so, and scientists as yet are unsure what it will yield (Martin).

Even if scientists were able to find DNA usable for cloning dinosaurs, they would face the major issue of putting the dinosaurs into a suitable ecosystem (Lamb). Scientists wouldn’t be able to find the prey or plants on which dinosaurs fed for necessary proteins and vitamins, for example, nor could they readjust oxygen levels to suit dinosaur metabolism. These are just two of the many difficulties a cloning project would face even if they were successful. So, even if scientists were able to clone dinosaurs from the DNA strands, they wouldn’t be able to sustain them environmentally (Ross).

While the film Jurassic Park could not come true in real life, it has sparked the development of ancient DNA research and many further discoveries about dinosaurs. A visual effects specialist on the film, Phil Tippett, says that he has “completely different ideas of what [dinosaurs] should be like now. If [they] were making a different dinosaur movie that didn’t have to be Jurassic Park, [he] would do things totally differently.... [A] lot of this stuff that they’ve discovered about feathers is pretty significant” (Halton). Thus, while Jurassic Park itself may never come to life, the scenarios it envisions continue to inspire the minds of artists and scientists alike, and its potential outcomes continue to proliferate.