The instant movie classic Jurassic Park was released in 1993 and was directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie opens with two paleontologists deciding to take a look at an amusement park that has real life dinosaurs. After not even visiting for a day, everything goes horribly wrong.

In the movie, scientists recreate dinosaurs by using mosquitoes who stung the dinosaurs when they were still alive. The mosquitoes landed on trees and got in the tree sap, solidifying into a rock. The scientists would then proceed to extract the DNA in the blood from the mosquitoes. The only problems the scientists faced would be filling in the gaps in the DNA, so they used the DNA of frogs to fill in the gaps. And viola! They made dinosaurs! They even made sure that the dinos could not reproduce by making them all girls.

Now the answer to the question is, could this actually happen?

Back in 1999, when the movie was made, it seemed like it! “Newsweek ran an article attesting to the scientific plausibility of Jurassic Park, pointing to the fact that – during filming – two Berkeley scientists announced that they had cloned 40m-year-old bee DNA after finding the insect preserved in amber,” The Guardian said.¹ But the problems begin there. To replicate a dinosaur's genome you would need billions of base pairs. But no mosquito harvested would have more than 250. And one more tiny problem with Jurassic Park: no one has ever found any dinosaur DNA. “Scientists know that DNA degrades over time, and the oldest DNA ever found is about a million years old. The dinosaur DNA you need would have had to survive around 65m years,” The Guardian said.¹ Meaning it is almost impossible to find viable dino DNA.

Recreating dinosaurs like in Spielberg's Jurassic Park is almost completely impossible. And that might just be a good thing seeing how the last five movies have turned humans into dinosaur snacks. Although it would still be really cool to see a Velociraptor on your way to school.