Jurassic Park’s Stars Would Be Very Different If Film Made Today | Hacker News Reader

Jurassic Park’s Stars Would Be Very Different If Film Made Today

blogs.smithsonianmag.com

20 pointsapress22 comments

"Believing that dinosaurs could ever be cloned."

Well, you need to let that one go if you want to make a movie about dinosaurs.

The intriguing part is, that while it is impossible to get DNA out of 15 million year old dinosaur bones, you could get dinosaur DNA fragments from the genome of currently living birds...

And that idea was used in Russian novel Ретрогенетика ("Retrogenetics") by Кир Булычёв, written in 1975.

That was in the book "Jurassic Park". That's why the dinos change sexes -- because they have DNA from a reptile that does that.

... and so it was in the film. The video which they show in the information center talks about how they fill in the gaps from frogs to patch together a complete DNA.

If you're interested in that technique, check out Jack Horner's book "How to Build a Dinosaur" [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Dinosaur-Science-Evolution/d...

So why would dinosaurs evolve feathers before evolving flight?

I'm going by this diagram (however it doesn't show where early flying dinosaurs like Archaeopteryx would come in) http://biology.unm.edu/ccouncil/Biology_203/Images/Phylogeny...

Staying warm is one speculation that I have read (think how chickadees can live in -40 so feathers must be really warm).

Attracting mates, scaring off predators?

UV protection

> dinosaur DNA is way, way too old to recover.

With today's technology. Assuming a cache of DNA isn't found in conditions where it's unusually -- perhaps uniquely -- well-preserved. Without stitching together multiple samples or splicing in DNA from other species to make up gaps or degradations.

Saying it's fundamentally impossible is equivalent to saying you know something about your unknown unknowns. Impossible is a very strong claim -- not always insurmountable, e.g. thermodynamics says that certain high-efficiency engines can't exist. But I'm skeptical that we can be super-confident that we'll never be able to clone dinosaurs.

Of course there are gaps between what happens in the book/movie and what's possible today. That's why it's called science fiction -- if they limited themselves to what's currently feasible, it would be a documentary.

(Actually, that would be a fun way to troll someone who's never seen the movie -- tell them it's a documentary before you show it to them.)

Did you read the rest of that sentence? He didn't say it was too damaged. He says we've only been able to find DNA 6-7 million yrs old. A far cry from the 65 million yrs for dinosaurs. Even if the technology catches up, there will be no dinosaurs until we can find dinosaur DNA.

Copy-pasting from this website into my other comment gave me the following:

dinosaur DNA is way, way too old to recover

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/06/jurassic-p... Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

I subsequently edited away the second line, because anyone reading this commment thread presumably already knows how to find the article.

They must use JS to insert the second part as invisible text whenever you select something? Does anyone want to dive into the source and analyze what the site's doing? It's an interesting hack.

there is an error here: Tasmanian devils are very much NOT extinct... I think the correct reference is Tasmanian Tiger

Yes, but last I heard the population was not considered healthy either (something about a facial cancer that can be passed from animal to animal)...so give is a few months and the statement might be correct.

They are almost gone (down to an estimated 10K) but they were almost wiped out by disease once before and the population bounced back.

IIRC that condition has been around a few years now. The devil may not be in great shape, but I don't think demise is imminent.

not a few months, especially since facial-tumor resistant individuals have cropped up. (one of the principal investigators in my building has done some work characterizing the tasmanian devil situtation).

Just as a side record, a recommendation on reading the original book from Michael Crichton is in order.

I found it engaging, including gore imagery, chaos theories and some insightful characters.

I actually don't think it would be much different at all.

Well they wouldn't have fsn to show this time around.

Doesn't the little fat kid in the beginning suggest that a velociraptor was nothing but a big chicken? Seems he was eerily close to completely accurate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com