I caught Steven Spielberg's dinosaur movie Jurassic Park on television a few nights ago.
In case you're one of the two or three people in the known universe who've not seen the movie, its plot revolves around an ill-fated preview tour of an island theme park featuring live cloned dinosaurs.
Scientists in the film cloned the dinosaurs using DNA found in dino blood that had been sucked up by pre-Ice Age mosquitoes preserved in amber.
In 1993, when the movie first came out, I remember thinking how cool it would be to see living dinosaurs in a zoo, but it was pretty obvious that the technology in the film was just pure fiction, right?
Sure, just three years after Jurassic Park came out, scientists in Scotland cloned the first mammal - a sheep named Dolly - but that's still a far cry from making a tyrannosaurus rex.
I mean, a sheep seems to be the complete opposite of a tyrannosaurus rex.
One's a giant, carnivorous reptile with giant, razor-sharp teeth, and the other would be its terrified and somewhat cottony lunch.
But did you know that in the 1990s, as Spielberg was raking in millions from Jurassic Park, and controversy was swirling around the morality and ethics of cloning a sheep named Dolly, scientists were already trying to clone a prehistoric beast?
It's true.
Scientists back then made several attempts to clone a woolly mammoth, but failed mainly because the beastie's soft tissue extracted from the ice had been, y'know, frozen for more than 5,000 years - so the DNA was damaged.
Unlike most other prehistoric animals, woolly mammoth remains are often not fossilized (turned into stone), but are preserved by the frozen climate in which they lived.
Science eventually found a way to successfully clone a mammal using frozen soft tissue in 2008, and now a Japanese scientist has said he can probably produce a living woolly mammoth in about five years.
All it's going to take is some DNA scrounged from a frozen mammoth carcass from Russia, some test tube magic, and a female African elephant willing to play surrogate.
Boy, she'll have some questions to answer down at the mud pit: "No, I never met the father, actually, because he's been dead for 5,000 years."
I bet that'll raise some elephant eyebrows.
Do elephants even have eyebrows?
Woolly mammoths probably do.
Anyway, this scientist must be one of the people who've not seen Jurassic Park; otherwise, he wouldn't be messing with dino DNA.
Forget the morality or ethics of cloning or bringing back extinct animals - I'm more concerned about being eaten by a tyrannosaurus rex right now.
But the technology is there, so they're going to try and give it a go.
The research team said they do want to discuss breeding and whether to show the animal in public once they are successful.
It'll be quite a feat to bring these prehistoric beasts back from extinction, that's for sure.
Thankfully, finding DNA from the scary, reptilian dinosaurs is much more difficult, so we may have much longer to wait for the chance to be an entrée for an escaped T-Rex.
But just to be on the safe side, if you do happen to find a Jurassic mosquito encased in amber somewhere, I'd appreciate it if you just kept it to yourself.
