Jurassic Park, fortunately or not, would be functionally impossible IRL. It turns out that the half-life of DNA is only 521 years. So, after a minimum of 65 million years, there wouldn’t be anything usable left.

To check and see how long it could potentially last, I found out that the Australian lungfish has 43 billion base pairs in its genome (the largest one known). Log2(43 billion)=35.324 half-lives * 521 years per half-life=18,403.804 years.

So, yes, even if a mosquito somehow managed to suck that lungfish’s blood and then got preserved in amber, that DNA would only have lasted 18,403 years. And that’s not even “with holes in the genome that can be filled with frog DNA”, that’s ANY DNA.

Well, yeah, but now with your fact-checking you're just ruining the fun of fiction.

(May 29, 2023 at 11:15 pm)Tomato Wrote: Well, yeah, but now with your fact-checking you're just ruining the fun of fiction.

True. Hell, and even if they did get the DNA for the Velociraptors, they’d end up looking like giant pheasants. Imagine being hunted by something that looks like this.

Velociraptor were the size of medium sized dogs, not the 6 foot tall killers depicted in Jurassic park. The theory that their toe claws let them disembowel much larger pray with slashing kicks is not supported by bio-mechanical modeling, which suggest their claws lack the sharpness to cut through dermis and would get stick in victim’s skin and muscles instead, leaving the velociraptor in an awkward position vs the now very angry putative victim. In other words the notion that velociraptors would pose mortal danger to human sized mammals should we ever meet them is not well supported by paleontology .

Which is why I used the Utahraptor in my photo which is inexplicably no longer working.

Tepui are tabletop mountains in the border region of Venezuela and Guayana.

They tower above the rain forest with 90° steep walls of up to 700m/2000ft, the highest one reaches up to 2800m/10.000ft total, the biggest one covers an area of 650km^2.
The climate is entirely different from the rain forest with average temperatures of only 10C. On top of those mountains there are endemic species of flora and fauna that can not be found elswhere on the world.

Of many of those Tepui we only have maps from radar equipped copters or from space, because they are engulfed by clouds most of the time. Man (who was on the moon already) has not set foot on many of them until now. Some of them have major caves, which are not explored yet and giant sinkholes that are up to 600m deep.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World is based on the notion that tepuis’ cliffs had separated the flat tops from the ecosystems all around them since Mesozoic era,  so isolated remnant populations of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals continue to thrive on top of the tepuis. 

In fact,   The tops of the tepuis really are the erosional remnants of the originally continuous land surface during the Mesozoic when South America was part of the supercontinent Pangea.

Doyle guessed right, but he could not have known it for sure given the state of geological science at the time.

Julie Newmar is still alive.

Boru

(May 30, 2023 at 1:44 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Julie Newmar is still alive.

Boru

So is Robert Wagner

(May 30, 2023 at 1:44 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Julie Newmar is still alive.

Boru

She apparently owned a few patents.    Although I wouldn’t say her patents put her in the same league as Heady Lamarr.