If you've seen "Jurassic World" or any installment of the "Jurassic Park" series, the question of whether these films could one day be more than just fiction has probably crossed your mind. At least, it’s certainly crossed mine. Taking DNA from fossilized mosquitoes dating back to the Mesozoic Era and using it to fabricate and clone dinosaur DNA sounds plausible enough to me! Aside from the horror of mutant dinosaur hybrids breaking loose from zoo-like enclosures, eating tourists (and, well, everyone), destroying cities, and getting into vicious fisticuffs with other mutant dinosaur hybrids, how awesome would it be to have dinosaurs roaming around? It would be pretty darn cool, let’s be real. But is there any truth behind the scientific explanation used in the Jurassic Park franchise? Could this dream (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it) one day come true?

In a 2013 study, Dr. David Penney at the University of Manchester and his colleagues were just some of many scientists to take a stab at answering this question. Penney et al. used sub-fossilized, or partially preserved, stingless bees in copal, ranging from 60 to 10,600 years of age to see if they could extract insect DNA. Unlike past studies originating in the 1990’s, such as that of Woodward et al. (1994), suggesting that dinosaur DNA could possibly be found in dinosaur bone (which have been viewed with much skepticism), Penney’s team used highly sensitive sequencing technologies, such as the GS Junior 454 System. Previous studies were known to use polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which is a process used for sequencing that tends to provide false positives that mistake contaminated DNA strands for genuine ancient DNA.

Penney and colleagues were unable to find ancient DNA in the sub-fossilized bees, indicating that the likelihood of detecting DNA in much older samples is nearly, if not certainly impossible. Seeing as dinosaurs roamed the earth about 65 million years ago and are substantially older than the stingless bees of Penney’s study, we can determine with a great deal of confidence that dinosaur DNA has not survived the test of time and therefore cannot be extracted and cloned.

To crush our dreams of visiting a real life Jurassic World even more finely, researchers Morten Allentoft, Michael Bunce, and their team have determined that the half-life of DNA is 521 years. In other words, after 521 years of decay, half of the DNA breaks down and depletes. After another 521 years, half of the remaining DNA depletes, and so on exponentially. Allentoft and colleagues predict that after 1.5 million years, DNA would no longer be readable and any strands that might still exist would be too short to provide meaningful information.

So to answer our original question: No, it doesn't look as though Jurassic World will ever reach outside the realm of fiction and I will never have a pet T. rex. However, as reported by Live Science, although he is quick to concede to the impossibility of creating dinosaurs from fossilized DNA, John Horner, paleontologist, author, and real life inspiration behind Jurassic Park’s lead character, Dr. Alan Grant, has been working on making a living, breathing, miniature T. rex a reality in his Montana State University lab. Scientists are already making transgenic, or genetically altered, animals, Horner urges, which leaves him hopeful that the DNA of birds can be modified to reflect physical characteristics of dinosaurs. In fact, according to Horner, such modifications have already been performed by research teams at Harvard and Yale who retro-engineered the beak of a bird into a dinosaur-like mouth.

As much as I get excited about the giant reptiles and empathize with Horner’s desire to have a pet dinosaur, maybe Michael Crichton was right when he wrote "Jurassic Park"—maybe we shouldn't try to recreate lizard monsters in our labs, as awesome and beautiful as dinosaurs may be. But we can rest assured that cloning giant, man-eating dinosaurs is nowhere in our future (unless some crazy turn of events happens where we find meaningful strands of dino DNA and discover that the research was wrong all this time...). Neither have modified dino-chickens taken flight (pun absolutely intended). Still, you never know. In the foreshadowing words of Dr. Ian Malcolm…