Despite us not making any claims to have extracted dino DNA, the question that seems to be on most lips is "does this bring us closer to a real Jurassic Park?" The answer is "no".
First, the idea there is intact dino DNA contained within blood-sucking insects preserved in amber doesn't add up. Prehistoric mozzies containing dino blood have been found, but the dino DNA has long since degraded.
Neanderthal and woolly mammoth DNA has been successfully isolated, but dino DNA is too old. The oldest DNA found was about one million years old, but for dino DNA we would need to go back at least 66 million years, so we're not even close.
Second, even if we could extract dino DNA, it would be chopped into millions of tiny pieces and we would have little clue how they should be organised. It would be like trying to do the world's hardest jigsaw puzzle with no idea what the picture looked like or whether pieces were missing.
In Jurassic Park, the scientists find these missing pieces and fill them with frog DNA, but this wouldn't give you a dinosaur, it would give you a hybrid or a "frogosaur". These bits of frog DNA could have negative effects on the developing embryo. It would also be more sensible to use bird rather than frog DNA as they are more closely related (but it still wouldn't work).
Third, the idea that all you need is a strand of DNA and you can recreate a whole animal is, again, science fiction. DNA is a starting point but the development of the animal inside the egg is an intricate "dance" of genes switching on and off at the right time with a series of environmental cues.
In short, you need the perfect dino egg and all the complex chemistry contained within it.
In the book, they generate artificial eggs, in the films they use ostrich eggs. Neither would work, you can't put chicken DNA inside an ostrich egg and hope to get a chicken (people have tried). The same would be true of a Velociraptor.
And this is before we even consider legislature, planning permission, protest groups and the effect on the ecosystem.
So we can't resurrect a dinosaur, but ...
Dinosaurs never did become extinct. They are among us now. Birds did not evolve from dinosaurs, birds are dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs (including birds) are the survivors of at least four extinction events, emerging each time in more diverse, weird and wonderful forms. One key element of our paper is that we theorise that their ability to do this is facilitated by their genome structure.
We discovered that birds and most non-avian dinosaurs had a lot of chromosomes (packages of DNA). This allows animals to generate variation, the driver of natural selection.
Nevertheless, and it is a long shot, it may be possible in future to use Jurassic Park technology to help undo some of the harm humans have caused. Mankind has seen the extinction of avian dinosaurs such as the dodo and passenger pigeon. Recovery of DNA that is a only few hundred years old from these birds is a more realistic proposition.
Also, it could be that eggs from closely related living species might just be good enough. In the right conditions we may be able to use them to resurrect some of these extinct species.
• Darren Griffin is Professor of Genetics, University of Kent
• Rebecca O'Connor is Postdoctoral research associate, University of Kent
- The Conversation
