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I. The Original Jurassic Park

Do you remember watching Jurassic Park on the big screen? Not The Lost World. Not Jurassic Park III. Or whatever the hell Chris Pratt was recently in.

Do you remember the ORIGINAL Jurassic Park?

Because I sure do. I remember the terrible lizard eye peering past Lexie and into my soul.

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I remember the moment when the velociraptors learned to open doors—though let’s be clear, the operators of Jurassic Park could have made the park a lot safer simply by using door knobs instead of handles. For crying out loud, John Hammond! Even dogs can open doors with handles.

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I also remember what I took away from that experience. CGI is going to change Hollywood.

And it did.

I certainly didn’t leave the theatre thinking that dinosaurs would be resurrected in my lifetime. After all, Hollywood also predicted that we’d all have hoverboards by 2016.

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And no, this is NOT a hoverboard.

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This is what’s left when you subtract a unicycle from a tricycle.

II. Jurassic Problems

In the original film, the process for bringing back dinosaurs was as simple as cloning sheep. You just needed to get your hands on some dinosaur DNA, shove said DNA in some existing cells, and let nature do it’s magic.

Of course dinosaur DNA isn’t just lying around. Sure we have all kinds of fossils, but good luck making use of any bits of DNA you find in those dry and dusty old things.

Thank god for amber, where Jurassic era mosquitos are apparently preserved in pristine condition, serving as nature’s stockpile of dinosaur DNA.

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Lucky for us, movie fans, Jurassic era mosquitos apparently do a hell of a job of preserving dinosaur blood. And dinosaur blood apparently does a fantastic job of preserving dinosaur DNA.

There’s only one problem with this very clever idea. It doesn’t seem to work. Scientists have actually obtained samples of insect tissue from copal, which is similar to amber. While scientists were able to gather some DNA material from said copal, It was barely enough to encode a single gene. Good luck trying to capture the full biodiversity of the Sinclair family from that.

Gotta love me!

Gotta love me!

It turns out that DNA is more fragile than scientists had anticipated. Not only does DNA have to deal with decay by bacteria and other molecular predators, it also has to survive millions of years of bombardment by cosmic rays.

Unfortunately, it would seem this route to resurrecting dinosaurs (or any other creatures) ends prematurely.

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Does this mean we have no hope of ever bringing dinosaurs back? Well yes, and no. We may never be able to bring back the dinosaurs, in the sense of simply cloning the actual beasts that wandered the earth 200 million years ago. But we might be able to create a pretty damn good dinosaur knockoff.

To understand how that might work—how we might actually some day be able to visit Jurassic Land™ replete with hundreds or thousands of dinosaurs, perhaps within our lifetime—we will first consider the Woolly Mammoth.

III. How the Woolly Mammoth Came Into Vogue

By now we all know that 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists agree: Global temperatures are increasing because of us. Given that some folks (read: some folks in the NBA) still believe the earth is flat, having 97 percent of any group in complete agreement is sort of a miracle.

On the other hand, there is a lot of disagreement on how to solve this problem. Should we legislate the carbon emissions away? Should we build a vacuum to suck all the carbon out of the air? Move to a new planet that is, admittedly, pretty damn hostile to life even on its best days?

In “Pleistocene ParkThe Atlantic presents yet another option to curb global warming: Bring the woolly Mammoth back from extinction. This idea is the brainchild of Sergey Zimov, a Russian geophysicist who founded Pleistocene Park, a 160 square kilometer wildlife preserve, in an attempt to reengineer Siberia’s Steppe grasslands.

The problem, as Zimov sees it, is that the tundra holds a large quantity of greenhouse gases (methane). As the tundra begins to thaw due to rising global temperatures, these greenhouse gases will be released and further exacerbate global warming. Therefore, we need to do whatever we can to stop the tundra from thawing.

It turns out that a grassland is more resilient to thawing than a forest. And to prevent those sons-a-bitch trees from popping up anywhere and everywhere they can, you need either the Once-ler’s Super-Axe-Hacker,

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or a herd of Woolly Mammoths. Because apparently knocking over trees for shits and giggles is something mammoths did back during the last ice age.

Therefore, if you could repopulate the tundra with Woolly Mammoths, they could eventually convert forests (which currently dominate the landscape) into grasslands. The thawing of the tundra would slow down, and the world could avoid a sharp increase in global warming.

And the thing is, there are scientists currently working to bring the woolly Mammoth back to life as we speak. Well, maybe not the Woolly Mammoth exactly.

IV. How to Forge a Mammoth

Here’s the basic recipe for creating a woolly Mammoth:

  1. Obtain elephants, the unsurprising descendent of the Mammoth.
  2. Tweak the elephants’ genes.
  3. Repeat step 2 until you get a thing that’s close enough to a Woolly Mammoth.

Elephants and mammoths are, perhaps unsurprisingly, related.

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Note the Mammoth and modern Asian Elephant both descended from the common family Elephantina. Not to be confused with the Elephantini, or the Elephantidae or the Elephantoidea…

Now, to tweak an elephant’s genes you need good gene-editing technology. Luckily, we already have such a technology. It’s called CRISPR, and it will more than likely change the world in ways you can’t even imagine. CRISPR allows scientists to add, remove, or swap out genes in a sequence of DNA.

Over the last couple years, a team at Harvard has been using CRISPR to edit elephant genes in hopes of creating a mammophant, an elephant-mammoth hybrid that will be suited for life on the tundra. It may take a few more years or a few more decades. But in all likelihood, we will have mammophants walking around in the foreseeable future. Maybe a couple herds roaming through Pleistocene Park and knocking down trees. You know, doing their part to stop global warming, which is more than can be said of the current executive and congressional leadership.

And once you have a mammophant, why stop there?

V. The Danger of Jurassic Land™

Even if it were technically feasible, why would anyone build a giant park with dinosaurs that could kill the visitors?

Same reason the corporate folks let Anthony Hopkins build human level AI’s in Westworld: the almighty dollar.

We can’t even pass sensible legislation that would prevent Verizon from selling our browsing history to the Yakuza. You really think we are going to err on the side of “it’d be cool to have a dinosaur park, but probably unwise”? Are you really doubting the influence of the entrenched theme park lobby in D.C.?

There is no doubt that once dinosaurs exist, some old, rich white guy will build the biggest and baddest theme park the world has ever seen. Complete with a real T-Wrex™ and gaggle of Velocity-raptors™.

I can only hope that for everyone’s safety, that the creators of Jurassic Land™ opt for knobs instead of handles.

Jesse Stone

Jesse B. Stone loves science and writing. Apologies if you were looking for the "Jesse Stone" played by Tom Selleck in the CBS movies.

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