Fun with Science Club®


			Could “Jurassic Park” really happen? Beth Tyler 06.01.01 In the movie “Jurassic Park”, scientists found dinosaur DNA in a fossilized insect preserved in amber. Amber is a yellowish-brown tree substance that ancient insects and plants accidentally got stuck in, preserving them for millions of years. While amber preserves insects and plants very well, can the DNA survive for millions of years? Five scientists in London, England wanted to find out if they could find DNA in ancient insects. They took cells from different places in each insect’s body and tried to get DNA from them. Because DNA is the same in every cell in the body, the scientists should get the same DNA sequence from all the different cells. After analyzing 156 samples from 15 ancient insects, the scientists did not find any consistent DNA samples from the ancient insects. They concluded that scientists cannot know the DNA sequence from insects millions of years old. However, amber-preserved fossils still give scientists a lot of important information, like what ancient insects and plants looked like.


			Austin, Jeremy J., Andrew J. Ross, Andrew B. Smith, Richard A. Fortey, and Richard H. Thomas. 1997. Problems of reproducibility- does geologically ancient DNA survive in amber-preserved insects? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 264: 467- 474.