Jurassic Park proved 'impossible' by DNA research
Spoilsports in New Zealand discover the half-life of DNA makes dino theme park a no-no
'Jurassic Park' will never become a reality thanks to new DNA research, it has emerged.
Palaeogeneticists from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Perth in Australia have discovered that DNA has a half-life of 521 years, after studying the leg bones of giant extinct birds called moa in New Zealand.
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The discovery means that the material would have degraded long before it could be sucked out of a blob of amber, as fictionalised in Steven Spielberg's film and Michael Crichton's book.
Even in perfect preservation conditions, DNA will become 'unreadable' after 1.5 million years, making hopes of a deadly tropical theme park a tragic impossibility.
“This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect,” said Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, to science journal Nature.
Advances in reading DNA would not help either, with every nucleotide bond in a DNA strand having broken down by 6.8 million years.
Sadly, the last of the dinosaurs died out around 65 million years ago.