Would it be possible to make a real “Jurassic Park”?

The “Jurassic Park” movies imagine a future in which scientists have been able to bring dinosaurs back to life by finding their DNA in dinosaur fossils and using it to recreate real dinosaurs. Could this ever really happen?

We can break this question into two main parts: First, could we bring back an extinct species if we found its DNA? Second, can we find its DNA?

The answer to the first question is almost certainly yes. Scientists already know how to edit genomes with DNA. So, for example, if we had DNA from a wooly mammoth, we could in principle implant it into an elephant embryo, so that a female elephant could end up being a surrogate mother to a mammoth.

That brings us to the second question: finding the DNA from the extinct animal. This is where it becomes much more difficult. Remember that most fossils are not actual remains of the living material of an organism, but instead are mineralized replacements. DNA, in particular, breaks down quite rapidly after an organism dies, no matter how well-buried it is. For wooly mammoths, which went extinct only about 10,000 years ago, scientists have managed to find some fragments of preserved DNA, a fact that has led some scientists to propose attempts to bring back the species. However, we are nowhere near finding enough intact DNA to put together a complete mammoth genome, making most scientists doubt that we could really restore mammoths to the Earth, even if we wanted to.

Now think about the fact that while the last mammoths died out about 10,000 years ago, the last dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago. If you divide, you’ll see that this means that in looking for dinosaur DNA, we’d be looking for DNA that is at least 6,500 times as old as mammoth DNA. So if it’s difficult to find the DNA needed to recreate mammoths, it’s almost impossible to imagine that we could find the DNA needed to bring back dinosaurs — unless you are a science fiction writer with a lot of imagination. This brings us to the bottom line: Jurassic Park may be really fun to imagine, but it’s highly doubtful that it could ever really come to be.