Jurassic World: just how impossible is it?

In the movie business, bigger is usually better, bigger spaceships, bigger disasters, bigger dinosaurs and the latter was especially true in the latest installment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World. Although the Indominus rex knocked the Tyrannosaurus rex into a cocked hat when it came to size, strength, speed and special abilities, the ‘scientific’ details of its creation are perhaps not so far-fetched if you accept the original premise of Jurassic Park. However, that is a big IF! Twenty years ago many of us enjoyed the scientific ideas suggested by Jurassic Park, either in the Michael Crichton book or in the Spielberg film. For those younger readers who haven't seen the original film; the idea was that scientists had managed to extract dinoDNA from a mosquito that had been trapped in prehistoric amber. This DNA was attached to a nucleic acid scaffold from a frog and ‘voila!’ there were more Stegosauri, Brontosauri and T. rex's than you could shake a pipette at! Inevitably as we left the cinema, we asked if this would ever be ‘possible’? Indeed there are current efforts to recreate long-extinct creatures, although on a slightly less ambitious scale. Whatever the source of your dinosaur DNA; be it from fossilized bones or from an amber-trapped mosquito, the chances of it being intact are essentially nil making the idea of the creation of new dinosaurs from preserved DNA more fiction than fact.