jurassic-park

Jurassic Park proposed that dinosaur DNA could be recovered from insects preserved in amber, sequenced, gap-filled with frog DNA, and used to resurrect living dinosaurs. The film was entertaining. The science does not hold up. What the real science shows is both more limiting and, in some ways, more interesting than what Hollywood imagined — and the question of what is actually possible tells us something profound about DNA, deep time, and the nature of extinction.

The Velociraptor in Jurassic Park stands 1.8 meters tall, hunts in coordinated packs, and opens doors. The actual animal was the size of a turkey, covered in feathers, and probably hunted alone. Almost nothing about cinema's most famous raptor matches the fossil record — yet the real animal is, in its own way, more interesting than the fiction.