THE suggestion would be considered unbelievable - if it involved anyone other than Clive Palmer.
The controversial billionaire is rumoured to be planning to clone a dinosaur from DNA so he can set it free in a Jurassic Park-style area at his new Palmer Resort in Coolum.
Mr Palmer has, apparently, been in deep discussion with the people who successfully cloned Dolly the sheep to bring his dinosaur vision to life.
If Mr Palmer can resurrect the Titanic, what is to stop him from trying with another of his other alleged passions - dinosaurs?
This is just one of the rumours circulating about Mr Palmer's plans for Coolum.
And while the concept sounds like a joke, it apparently comes from a source close to Mr Palmer's inner circle.
It was the same source who provided the Daily with an exclusive peek at Mr Palmer's plans to build towering hotels at the Palmer Resort with a 20-storey sky needle and a giant, London Eye-style ferris wheel.
Mr Palmer has not commented on this vision yet. Sunshine Coast Mayor Mark Jamieson has said Mr Palmer was very serious about the plans.
It is also understood Mr Palmer intends to target the Middle East market for his resort.
But this vision, if it is correct, will not bring employment to the region.
It has been suggested he wants to use "fly-in, fly-out Muslim hospitality staff" to cater for his clientele.
While Mr Palmer was quick to deny he had plans to build a sky rail to Mount Coolum, he remains silent about the latest speculations.
He declined to answer questions relating to the dinosaur rumours and the Middle East.
A spokesman said Mr Palmer would hold a press conference in Brisbane on Friday.
There are two major problems with this plan, both overlooked in the book and movie. First, DNA by itself does not produce a complete organism. There are complex hormones provided by the mother which must be present in the egg or womb that control how the DNA transcripts into proteins at certain key stages in development, such as gender assignment. Second, and more importantly, the environment the dinosaurs lived in was very different than Earth today. It was considerably warmer with a much greater percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere. To hatch a dinosaur on Earth today would be like dumping a normal human onto the top of Kilimanjaro; they would be cold and gasping for breath!
ReplyDeleteNo genetic material survives for millions of years and the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. There is going to be no cloning of dinosaurs because there is nothing to clone from. We got no dinosaur dna. This story is a gag or the billionaire will be parted from his money by unscrupulous advisors.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071203-dino-mummy.html
ReplyDeleteThis debunks your theory of no genetic material survives millions of years.
Soft tissue doesn’t mean viable DNA, let alone DNA at all. They also found soft tissue in the skeleton of a trex, blood vessels and tissue but could not find any DNA, not even damaged DNA just none at all. And if any DNA was found on this mummy dino, viable or not, the story would have been everywhere as one of the largest discoveries in archaeology.
DeleteHell we tried cloning the Thylacine for years, an animal that went extinct only within the last century. The project was called off because all of the genetic samples they were able to get were too degraded; we aren’t able to clone something 80 years old let alone a few million.