Australian billionaire wants to build Jurassic Park-style resort
August 1, 2012
Jurassic Park (credit: Universal Pictures)
Controversial billionaire Clive Palmer is rumored 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, Sunshine Coast Daily reports.
Palmer has apparently been in deep discussion with the people who successfully cloned Dolly the sheep to bring his dinosaur vision to life.
A spokesman said Palmer would hold a press conference in Brisbane on Friday.
Comments (35)
by twm114
i wanna see a f****n dinosaur
by William
Ignore Clive Palmer, everyone in Queensland does.
He’s a self aggrandising f#wit and this thing will not happen by his hand. The whole story is just a media stunt he is using to fleece investors in his resort.
by Helio Perroni Filho
Why, I thought they were going to start small with this “bring species back from the dead” gig? Simple stuff, like resurrecting mammoths (for which we have a close-enough living model) and the Tasmanian tiger (for which we have at least some good chunks of DNA samples)?
Seriously though, that guy is a little over his head with this. It’s difficult enough to clone a living species; what is required here is to recreate an extinct species from scratch, reverse-engineering its DNA from our best guesses on their phenome.
by Bruce Wright
Are they really trying to reverse-engineer the DNA from “our best guesses on their phenome”? We’re not nearly able to do that even with living organisms, let alone those that have been extinct for millions of years. What I read is that they want to “clone a dinosaur from DNA,” not reverse-engineer the DNA – but even then, getting enough DNA to be useful would be a huge challenge. The only place I can even think to try to collect much of it would be in amber inclusions, but even that’s been subjected to millions of years of potential degradation.
I think you’re exactly right that he’s “a little over his head.”
by egore
Anything of the magnitude to restore such animals is bound to bring in megabucks to Austrailia. Long live the Clive Palmers.
by SpottedMarley
I swear.. billionaires have all the fun
by MikeB
Doesn’t Australia already have a disastrous record with introducing non-native species?
by Bruce Wright
Very interesting – but where are they getting the DNA to get things going? Perhaps an inclusion in a piece of amber? Could enough DNA possibly still be intact to reconstruct it? Certainly there are a number of questions that paleobiologists would like to have answered about the dinosaurs – were feathers common, or were they usually covered with scales like modern reptiles? Were they mostly or even entirely warm-blooded, as now appears likely? What about coloration and camouflage?
If it works, this could certainly help answer some of those questions, but the technical problems appear to be daunting. If they haven’t yet even had any success cloning the mammoths, this seems like it’s doomed to failure given current levels of technology. Perhaps even given any level of technology – there may no longer be enough information left to reconstruct a whole animal; even if you could construct an animal that sort of “looked like” a dinosaur, unless you had some confidence that its DNA was substantially similar to dinosaur DNA it would give you no substantially useful information about what the actual dinosaurs looked like.
by DrDubious
Apparently Sunshine Coast Daily is competing with The Onion.
by A4i
Well, dinosaurs had their chance. What’s the point of resurrecting a dominant species that effectively prevented mammal development for 250 million years? Let’s clone the plague bacteria and give Black Death another chance.
by Jane
We don’t have to, yersinia pestis is around and doing well- the plague doesn’t happen today because were not all covered in lice. Good try at a metaphor tho
Bring back the dinos!
by DougW
Why do people have such a hard time thinking clearly. ‘Bringing back’ extinct species in any real respect would require hundreds of individuals of both sexes, unless you are just talking about cloning and re-cloning the same individuals over and over. Also, there is a limit to the number of species that can be supported by the environment. If every species that ever existed were to be ‘revived’ the competition for resources would quickly re-eliminate many of them. This whole endeavor is much less of a scientific enterprise than it is a cry for attention and an attempt to make money at great risk to the general public.
by Dan
I want one!
by james
um, did this guy not see the movie(s)?…
by Atika
All of that money could be spent to improve the lives of people who are in abject poverty and to feed millions of hungry children around in the world and build good housing for millions of homeless people, improve healthcare for people of the world, build water salinizations plants all around the world so that people could have access to purified water.. build hydroponic systems all around the world to feed the hungry world.. there are much more important things that could be done with the money and its frankly just despicable and horrible to see this ‘monetary system’ with its billionaires, millionaires central banks, kings, politics, currencies , profit based system.. destroying the world and while millions, billions more need housing, food, med treatment those billionaires and corporations investting money on luxury and decoration.. Its just nuts!! I hate this system and people who play this mad monetary game and pay the system the taxes that it uses to enslave more people into debt chain.. We are all unsane.. World needs to transit into the Resource Based Economy where everyone would have access to anything necessarry, food,housing,med treatment,transportation, we need a collaborative system where people would be interested to help each other and form positive partnerships which would thrive everyone and not like today where Competition is praised , profit worshipped .. Check out everyone: http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com , http://www.thevenusproject.com and just google Resource Based Economy ..
by Mortran
I hope this is an attempt to be ironical.
Or are you seriously suggesting we should spend more money to increase the number of impoverished people?
Poverty doesn’t go away by giving money to the poor. They only become more.
by Marcos Marin
Become one and you will see why you cant do that, even if you wanted.
by Peter
The Sunshine coast needs the incentive. I used to live there and just sold my house on the beach at a $300,000 loss. Years of bad management by the labor government has seriously undermined the economy of the Sunshine coast. This may just be the ticket to bring tourist back to the region in greater numbers, supplying jobs for people who desperately need jobs to feed their children and keep a roof over their heads. In a market economy everyone has a chance to make money. Communism’s failures are a good indication that nothing else works. When people are better off, they are willing to spend money, which generates more jobs. Money is only any good when it goes around and greases the economy. People who have money are also more likely to give to charities, which feeds the starving multitudes in developing countries. We can not help them if we join them, no matter how noble that may seem. I say, go for it. Give capitalism a chance.
by Promethean
You’re forgetting that this is a tourist resort, not a piece of his private estate. If it gets built, it will probably help both scientific research and the local economy. And keep in mind that safaris are the one form of tourism that environmentalists don’t seem to complain much about.
by John Goodrich
Atika,
You might want to pick up a copy of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler’s recently published “Abundance” which outlines and details the coming and exponentially developing technological solutions to all the problems you listed.
Ironically, the greedy capitalist bastards will be heading the drive to automate the production of goods and services in order to maximize profits by eliminating human labor.
That will ultimately lead to what some futurists are predicting as the total obviation of human labor by 2030 (thereby necessitating a move to an economy other than capitalism,)
Production for human need rather than for profit is just a few decades away.
And humans will not be doing the dog work in that future.
by Gus
If such a socialist thing were possible where everyone had all they needed without having to work for it. Then human would become extinct in a few generations. If there is nothing motivating man to work then man (the majority) will do but sit on their hands and play video games, watch mindless television and eat themselves to death.
by Boristabby
Supposedly 50,000 years old is the absolute max for cloning?
by DeBee Corley
This is not possible.
I got this information from unimpeachable sources, critics of the first Jurassic Park movie.
by Bob
Many things that were not possible when the first Jurrasic Park movie was released are possible now :)
by J McDonald
Why not spend the money on preserving living things that are about to become extinct.
by Giulio Prisco
It is his money.
by Tolleridge
That’s not what J asked, goofball.
by Gorden Russell
I think there are people saving DNA now in freezers so that they can bring back extinct species in the future. After the singularity, when all our vehicles run on hydrogen and all our power comes from photovoltaics, we will be able to restore a livable environment for all the species that are dying out now while we are still buring coal.
by alliwant
Excellent point. I would add to that, why not try to resurrect recently extinct species like passenger pigeons, which were largely wiped out by hunting and could help preserve current biological diversity. Not as showy as dinosaurs, but might be more suitable.
by Bri
There are several preserves underway for the mega fauna lost after the last ice age. An ark of sorts is also well underway, to record as much about endangered or otherwise animals. They actually have soft tissue samples from over a million years ago. The DNA is degraded, but is somewhat decipherable. Probably the movie inspired him. I think I’d rather go to a virtual Jerassic park. If you spent one thousand dollars a day, since Jesus was around, you’d still have several hundred years to go.
by GatorALLin
…reply to J…because Dinosaurs are way….way cooler… and its about making money and being famous for this guy…not saving the extinct boring stuff.
by Mortran
Unnecessary.
We can still resurrect them AFTER they have become extinct.
by GatorALLin
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/17/japanese-scientist-says-well-have-mammoths-by-2015/#ixzz1p1enCma8
this was cool http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1961918,00.html
by GatorALLin
..so what happened to the woolly mammoth they at least had a good chance of bringing back??
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/13/woolly-mammoth-clone-russia-south-korea_n_1341430.html
Even though the woolly mammoth is not a dinosaur, I would fly in and pay to see that…
by Mortran
This will most likely be the first thing to happen.
And there are enough people around who can’t tell the difference between a mammoth and a dinosaur. For them it would be Jurassic Park.