A team of scientists at the University of Manchester have conducted a study which they believe disproves the central premise of the film franchise “Jurassic Park”. In the 1993 blockbuster which grossed one billion dollars at the box office on a budget just under $70 million, scientists were able to harvest dinosaur DNA sequences millions of years old from petrified tree resin.
What the scientists at the University of Manchester were able to show is that the medium of resin isn’t sufficient to preserve DNA longer than 10,600 years. While that is a remarkably long time to preserve DNA, it doesn’t even reach back into the Pleistocene period of 2,588,000 years BC to 11,700 BC which is the era of the Woolly mammoth. Oddly enough, the latter has been found preserved in subzero environments from Siberia to Alaska where ice was able to do what amber could not.
The team attempted to match DNA sequences from older samples of copalm (liquid amber) with no success. That led the team to reach the conclusion that recreating an entire eco system and species as was done in the film Jurassic Park which dates back 201.3 – 145 million years BC is unlikely.
For what it’s worth, a fourth installment of the Jurassic Park franchise is underway with a tentative release date of the summer of 2015.
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.