And now science will ruin Jurassic Park for you

By Sean O'Neal | October 11, 2012 | 7:30pm

Aux Features Film

Having previously ruined Batman, Spider-Man, and everything you enjoy eating or doing, science has another flight of fancy to drag down and bury with facts that prove fancies can't fly. This time it's Jurassic Park, the previously credible premise of which was that we might one day be able to resurrect dinosaurs using DNA extracted from mosquitoes preserved in amber, and then Richard Attenborough could feed his lawyers and grandchildren to them. "Well, actually," science now says, in that annoying tone of voice it has, nearly causing us to tune out completely the recent work of New Zealand researchers that has declared the half-life of DNA to be 521 years, based on studying hundreds of ancient moa bones in an attempt to ruin movies.

And while 521 years is even longer than was thought before, back when we were able to ignore such things if it meant a little Spielbergian escapism, it does mean that the last readable bit of DNA that could conceivably then be converted into dinosaurs—and then, inevitably, dinosaur-human hybrid super-soldiers—would disappear after around 1.5 million years. Ergo, actual dinosaurs are far too old for us to revive and exploit them, and we're left only with younger extinct animals like the bulldog rat or passenger pigeon that would make for shitty theme parks. "Life, uhhhhhhh, finds a way," Jeff Goldblum replies, to which science once again says, "NO IT DOESN'T." Shut up, science. [via io9]