Jurassic No-Parking

Remember that movie about extracting DNA from amber and then engineering dinosaurs that run rampant? Suspense, people getting eaten, music by John Williams, produced by Steven Spielberg, fabulous special effects? Wasn't true to the book in several ways, but never mind about that now.


It was a propaganda tool for evolution and millions of years, but I think they were simply using what was commonly accepted as science, though it was historical science with some speculative operational science added to the story. Neat idea about extracting DNA from amber, though.

stock.xchng/EdwinP

Ain't happening, Zeke. DNA deteriorates too much. It is useless after thousands of years, let alone, after millions of years. The stuff (and the Earth itself) just is not that old.

Claims of ancient DNA hundreds of thousands of years old may be false.  No DNAwas found in an insect encased in amber said to be 10,600 years old.

The article on Science Daily suggests that a study published in PLoS ONE puts the “final nail in the coffin” of Jurassic Park’s thesis that dinosaurs could be reconstructed from fossilized DNA in amber.  Researchers from the University of Manchester looked for DNA in Colombian copal, the resin precursor of amber.  Using “sensitive next-generation methods”, they obtained sequences a few hundred bases in length, but could not match them to the insects.  They concluded, therefore, that they are artifacts.  The abstract states,

Read the rest of the article, encased at "DNA in Amber Doesn't Last Long".

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