What if scientists did find a way to clone dinosaurs?

Would they not learn from Jurassic Park and make a dinosaur park anyway for greed?And who would be stupid to go there and we all agree the lawyers will be the first to be eaten.

They wouldn't do anything like that.

Well... somebody would try to weaponize it. Don't know what that would accomplish, though.

I doubt we'd get a big park like in the movie, though. Far, far too expensive as a private venture, and if it became a government idea it would probably have better security (i.e. armed soldiers...), so, it would likely end far better than it did then.

Plus, you know, we have better computers today, so...

edited 30th Aug '11 5:11:07 PM by USAF713

I'm not sure the environment on Earth is suitable for them anymore.

Besides, anybody wasting money on bringing back creatures whose era is over could be spending it a lot better on preventing us from losing the creatures that we're driving to extinction now. In my opinion.

I imagine people would get very excited about it very briefly, and then nothing would come of it due to lack of funding.

It might resurface a few years later as a programme to clone some kind of prehistoric rodent, fish or tree-fern that goes largely unreported and unnoticed by people without any specific interest in biology.

Something tells me that to bring even a relatively small or simple dinosaur to a few years of age alive and well will take something like hundreds of years of research.

If they did, which they won't, something like Jurassic Park sure as hell wouldn't happen. People aren't THAT stupid and incompetent.

So they figured the cure for cancer is a crapshoot after I Am Legend? And making zombies or rage induced humans is a pretty bad idea.

Either way, you run. Far away, in the other direction. And away from Vince Vaughn.

edited 30th Aug '11 5:17:08 PM by Newfable

Jurassic Park is a work of fiction. Nothing like it has ever happened at any point in history, and taking it as a practical lesson would be silly. The reason the dinosaurs escaped from confinement was because if they didn't you wouldn't have a movie.

Realistically, confining dinosaurs would probably be entirely feasible provided you had a big enough budget, and a park where people could see real live dinosaurs would definitely be able to bring that kind of revenue in, except possibly because too many people would be scared due to exposure to Jurassic Park.

If a big corporation didn't have the money for it, they'd take out loans. A T rex would probably be more difficult to contain than a rhinoceros, but not orders of magnitude more difficult. It wouldn't be cheap, but it'd have nothing on space travel, and private companies engaging in space flight already exist.

Yeah,I could see that research be used for bringing back endangered species that near the brink.I also think it would be a wonderful thing because it would be better than getting eaten alive by a T-rex or being chased by raptors and we have to leave the jerks behind to get eaten.

However,like all things this kind of research can be stolen and used for the purpose of evil.

Honestly, I don't think containing the beasts would be difficult. They wouldn't be as generally aggressive as they were in the movie.

Taking care of them, on the other hand, would be a logistical nightmare, and they would be both expensive to breed via cloning and dangerous to breed naturally.

Can you imagine the amount of meat you'd need to sustain a T-Rex? We just don't have carnivores that big anymore.

USAF@I am afraid they might try to taste human flesh.And it would be wise to have them somewhere in a secluded island but then again that worked against the characters in both the movie and the book.Also all the dinosaur behavior is speculated and guessed.Then again lets hope that the raptors aren't as smart but at least the velocoraptors are smaller than they appeared in the movie.

That's why you also clone herbivores.

edited 30th Aug '11 5:27:18 PM by Erock

Joyflower, dinosaurs are just animals... and animal psychology doesn't work like that.

Nah, they'd breed carnivores, too. More money to be made there. It would be just like how we deal with large predators today, just even more expensive to maintain.

There would have to be special laws for aquatic reptiles and aerial reptiles of the dinosaur era though (we can't even keep Great Whites in a tank, let alone a Plesiosaur), as well as the whole ethical debate on whether they'd be allowed to have the animals hunting each other and, effectively, fighting, or not...

I'd be more worried about cleaning the enclosures...

But to do that you have to wait a long time for them to get to a decent size. How long did the big herbivorous dinosaurs live for? Can you breed/clone them fast enough to meet the demands of your T-rex, bearing in mind how the food pyramid usually means a small number of carnivores living off a large number of herbivores?

And then you have the difficulty of what to feed the herbivores.

And is it worth the vast amount of money cloning a dinsaur simply for it to be lunch for another dinosaur? No, I think it's more likely they'd feed the T-rexes cows. Lots of cows.

edited 30th Aug '11 5:33:26 PM by LoniJay

Well they wouldn't really be full dinosaurs I guess as genome sequences from extinct animals are likely to be full of fatal errors, so you'd have to do some fancy sequencing/borrowing from similar living day descendants.

You'd then probably be limited by size of the reptile that would carry the embryo to term, so small dinosaurs to start with.

Following this line of thought you'd have small 'dinosaurs' that weren't likely to be a huge threat to humanity.

(Science bits gleaned from NewScientist article about recreating extinct species.)

So,we would be creating mini dinosaurs rather than full dinosaurs well someone would pay to see that.If they have enough money for this dinosaur project they should use that money to fund restoring endangered species with it.I wonder if they have to dart they animals before cleaning out the enclosures.

edited 30th Aug '11 5:37:55 PM by joyflower

I'm going to be cynical and say that the only way that a method of cloning of dinosaurs would even be developed would be if some organization that wanted something like Jurassic Park funded it. It's simply too expensive and impractical for it to be a pure research project. The money would come from a company that thought that they could make even more money off of it. The best way to make lots of money off of dinosaurs would be to put them on display and charge a hefty admission.

Well, I agree with you Mad, but there's an argument to be made that there is no practical reason to even consider bringing back dinosaurs. A fairly recently-extinct species? Sure. Dinosaurs? A pointlessly expensive venture to recreate animals that can't even survive in our biosphere naturally anymore.

So, yeah, it wouldn't be done unless businesses stand to make a metric fuckton of money...

@Joyflower

Recipe here:

Silly idea is silly.

We'd be better off bringing back the dodo, IMO.

So long as they don't stupidly understaff the park a dino park could work.

I have seen stuff about reverse engineering chickens though.

It's an interesting (and kinda funny) video.

Edit: To clarify, this isn't a joke video. He's actually presenting evidence as to why it might work.

edited 30th Aug '11 8:29:32 PM by DrunkGirlfriend