Is Jurassic Park Possible?

In the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World movies, scientists bring back dinosaurs that have been extinct for at least 65 million years. (Spoiler alert: Bad idea.)

Is this purely fiction, or could we actually see a Brachiosaurus, Triceratops or T. rex stomping around a theme park someday?

To clone, which means to recreate, an extinct dino, you need some of its DNA. DNA is a special material inside every living thing that carries all the instructions for what it’ll be like, including how it will look and what it can do (DNA is shaped kind of like a teeny-tiny spiral staircase, but it takes a very powerful, very specialized microscope to see it.)

In the movies, scientists find fragments of dinosaur DNA in the blood of an ancient mosquito. The mosquito had gotten stuck in gooey tree resin, which fossilized into hard amber. The scientists extract the DNA fragments, fill in gaps with other animals’ DNA to get a full strand of DNA, and tinker a bit along the way. Then they clone lots of darling baby dinos…which grow up to be not-so-darling adult dinos.

The main challenge in creating a real-life Jurassic Park is finding dinosaur DNA. Is it locked away in amber, Jurassic Park-style? Amber does a great job of preserving all kinds of cool things, like fossilized flowers, insects and even tiny lizards. But DNA? Nope. A team of researchers tried to extract DNA from a couple of bees caught in tree resin that wasn’t even hardened into amber yet — and they couldn’t do it. It turns out that amber (and resins in general) aren’t great at preserving DNA.

But that isn’t the biggest problem.

As soon as something dies, its DNA begins to decay. Water, sunlight, microbes in soil, even other gunk in the creature’s own body, all cause chemical reactions that mess up the DNA.

“All of these things will break down the DNA into smaller and more degraded pieces until, eventually, there is nothing left,” biologist Beth Shapiro, an expert on ancient DNA, told Live Science.

It takes a long time for DNA to degrade completely. Scientists think DNA can last 1.2 million years, maybe even 3 million (some say 6 million) under certain conditions. They’ve identified DNA from a 70,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil, a 700,000-year-old ancient horse bone, and even a one million-year-old woolly mammoth tooth.

But a dinosaur from 65 million to 245 million years ago?

Researchers recently discovered something that looks kind of like DNA in a really well-preserved 125 million-year-old fossil of a peacock-sized dinosaur called Caudipteryx and in a 76 million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur called Hypacrosaurus. But they have no idea if it’s really from the dinosaurs; it could be from a microbe or something like a worm that crawled by more recently. And even if it really is dinosaur DNA, it may be seriously messed up.

So a real-life Jurassic Park may not be possible (sorry, dino fans).

But Woolly Mammoth Park? Maybe!

Woolly mammoths — the shaggy, long-tusked relatives of today’s elephants and the best-known of all the mammoths — first appeared about 300,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch, which included the Ice Age. That means their DNA is not anywhere near as old as dino DNA.

And, yes, scientists have successfully extracted DNA fragments from the teeth of multiple mammoths, which lived in a frigid area that is now Siberia. Some of the DNA, from an ancestor of the woolly mammoth, was 1.1 million to 1.2 million years old!

The cold environment of northern Siberia, where there are large areas of permafrost (permanently frozen ground), helped preserve the mammoth DNA. The mammoth DNA survived because it was more deep-frozen than fossilized, the science and tech website Gizmodo reported. Teams of scientists from nine countries pieced together the mammoth DNA fragments to learn about mammoths and how they evolved.

Now a group of scientists wants to see herds of woolly mammoths wandering across the Arctic tundra again. They are working on bringing them back — a process they call “de-extinction.” They plan to insert traits from a woolly mammoth into the DNA of an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative. They’d pick the most mammoth-like traits, like its shaggy coat and ability to withstand the cold. Then they would clone the animals.

To be honest, it wouldn’t create a true woolly mammoth, but more of a hybrid woolly mammoth-Asian elephant or a “mammophant.” But, if everything goes according to plan, the animal will look and act like a woolly mammoth.

Just like in the Jurassic Park movies, not everyone is enthusiastic about the idea of bringing extinct animals back to life. Even if scientists can bring back woolly mammoths, should they?

The idea raises a lot of questions about right and wrong. What if the environment has changed too much for woolly mammoths to thrive now? What if the plants they used to eat no longer exist? Or what if the elephants who would raise the first mammophants don’t accept them? And then there’s the question of people. Many more people live in the Arctic now than when woolly mammoths roamed the earth.

Other scientists think it would be better to use the process to keep currently endangered animals from going extinct. Scientists could insert traits into animals to make them healthier or to help them adapt faster to climate change, which threatens the habitats of many animals.

The scientists working to de-extinct woolly mammoths point out that the animals could help restore aspects of the tundra ecosystem that have suffered since the animals went extinct.

Eventually, the scientists would like to see herds of woolly mammophants wandering freely through the tundra. But the first few would be safeguarded in a nature reserve in Siberia. And what would they call this reserve? Pleistocene Park!