According to a new article in Nature, there is practically no hope that science can use DNA from dinosaurs dead for millions of years to create new dinosaurs. This is because DNA has a half-life of 521 years, a decay rate discovered recently by Morten Allentoft at the University of Copenhagen and Michael Bunce at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia.
What does that mean?
"That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a (DNA) sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on," Matt Kaplan writes in Nature.
It means that DNA decays quickly, and can't be read and used to reconstruct new dinosaurs for a modern day zoo. In fact, according to Nature, even in the best conditions, DNA becomes totally unreadable after 1.5 million years and every single bond in the DNA is broken after 6.8 million years.
So, even in the case of perfectly preserved mosquitoes stuck in hardened, golden amber, their abdomens full of DNA-rich T. rex blood, there's no hope for a park full of resurrected dinos. At their youngest, dinosaurs are 65 million years old.
"This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect," Simon Ho, a computational evolutionary biologist, says in Nature.
It's disappointing, if not just for the potential surge in pterodactyl hunting tourism business we could benefit from in Alabama.
(For the kids who might be reading this, "Jurassic Park" was a 1993 movie directed by Steven Spielberg in which dinosaurs -- which looked great at the time, but probably look silly next to "Avatar" -- were created in a lab using 65-million-year old dino DNA trapped in amber.
Spoiler alert: The dinosaurs get hungry, and it doesn't turn out well for the people who tried to play God.)
This story was updated at 2:45 p.m. to reflect that fact that some, perhaps many, dinosaurs are thought to have been warm-blooded. And that they weren't lizards. Fun fact: Although dinosaurs are not lizards, the word dinosaur means "terrible lizard".