What if Jurassic Park became a reality?
Jurassic Park was a cultural blockbuster international sensation that still lives up to its quality over 25 years later because the 1993 masterpiece was the landmark film for the next evolution of computer graphics that we see in every film today. But despite the incredible revolutionary graphics that made dinosaurs look real; what if you could witness them in real life?
If you answered yes then you’re in luck because scientists predict that we’ll be able to genetically engineer dinosaurs sooner than you might think.
They were magnificent gigantic lizards that roamed the Earth for millions of years before they suddenly went extinct in the blink of an eye.
Nobody knows how the dinosaurs disappeared off the face of the planet but there are several hypotheses.
The most popular being that a big meteorite crashed into Earth creating an extinction-level event that destroyed 99% of life. Others include ash and gas spewing from volcanoes that suffocated them, a global rampant disease or as simple as food chain imbalances that led to starvation.
Suffice it to say, humans are separated by a massive 66 million years of existence so there is still a lot we don’t know, other than what scientists speculate – like for instance, many think they weren’t scaly but had fur or feathers.
But what if scientists could do what we all thought was completely impossible and genetically recreate dinosaurs? Would you be for it?
Well Dr. Jack Horner believes that we could see dinosaurs back into existence in as little as five to 10 years from now.
The problem with that though is that a toad’s DNA wouldn’t work like it did in the film, but a group of scientists at Harvard and Yale – led by Dr. Horner – have discovered what modern animal could be the answer to the rebirth of dinosaurs.
Believe it or not, it’s a chicken.
Dr. Horner, who coincidentally consulted on every Jurassic film to date told People Magazine recently, “Of course, birds are dinosaurs. So we just need to fix them so they look a little more like a dinosaur.”
That sounds skeptical but the team has already made significant strides in genetic splicing that would essentially mutate a chicken back to its original descendent.
They also did the same thing back in 2015 by inserting genes of a woolly mammoth into an elephant in order to undo its extinction. A new method known as “Crispr” – which helps scientists replace parts of an elephant’s DNA with the mammoth genes would be the template for recreating the dinosaur.
In the movie, Dr. Ian Malcolm is the only one who has a moral problem – at first – with this extraordinary park and says “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether you could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
But to address the elephant in the room – pun intended – do we learn absolutely no lessons from movies? The whole point is that humans playing God is a bad idea and “life uh… finds a way.”