For just a couple of seconds, let's imagine that we'd actually want to revive the
after millions of years of extinction, completely disregarding
four
movies that tell us quite emphatically this is an objectively terrible idea.
The odds of velociraptor-assisted evisceration would be decidedly high, but let's say we paraphrase Ian Malcolm (as portrayed by
) and say that life found a way to restore the dinosaurs to their former glory. How exactly would we go about that?
If the original Michael Crichton book is anything to go by, we'd need our best scientists, state-of-the-art equipment, as well as a rich benefactor whose childlike enthusiasm for the Cretaceous creatures was matched only by a capitalist desire to make as much money from them as possible. Most importantly, we'd need dinosaur DNA. Lots of it.
In the 1990 novel Jurassic Park, this is achieved by lucking out and discovering a small amount of genetic material inside ticks and gnats fossilised in amber, but surely there would be an easier way to do that in real life, right? Maybe the answer would be a nest of fossilised dinosaur eggs, like the one recently discovered in China.
On Christmas Day in the Ganzhou Province of China, while we all indulged ourselves with Christmas turkey and successive viewings of Home Alone, a team of construction workers were on the cusp of an amazing discovery.
On this occasion, the construction site of a middle school was discovered to be the home of up to 30 fossilised dinosaur eggs.
While in the process of breaking the ground with explosives, one keen-eyed construction worker spotted a cluster of "oval-shaped stones" in the midst of all the dust and debris, with as much as two millimetres lodged between each egg.
Immediately halting the construction work, a team of palaeontologists from the Dayu County museum were called in, and from there, the discovery was confirmed: they were indeed fossilised dinosaur eggs.
According to that team, the eggs were from the Cretaceous period of history; the final age of the dinosaurs before they were wiped out.
Ganzhou is known as the "hometown of dinosaurs" by local media outlets, and with good reason: over the years, the region has been the home to plenty of dinosaur fossil discoveries. Particularly that of the dinosaur called the Oviraptor; a small-to-medium sized carnivore which stood at around 1.5m tall, and feasted mostly on the eggs of other dinosaurs.
At the moment, the eggs are being kept at the museum, where further studies will be conducted to find out more about these fascinating eggs, such as the species of dinosaur that expectantly laid them, one day more than 130 million years ago.
For now though, it's tempting to let our minds wander and our imaginations run wild, and think about how much we'd pay to see Jurassic Park in real life. Yeah, it's still a terrible idea, but the 15 minutes and 37 seconds before everything goes wrong and we're all running from deadly giant lizards would be decidedly life-changing, don't you think?
