Spielberg and Universal Begin Plotting 'Jurassic Park 4'

By: Mike Bracken
From: http://www.fandango.com/

Ready for another trip to Isla Nublar? Universal and Steven Spielberg hope so, as the famous director has begun to meet with screenwriter Mark Protosevich the discuss ideas for a fourth film in the popular Jurassic Park franchise.

Spielberg, who directed the first two Jurassic Park films and served as an executive producer on the third, must be feeling nostalgic lately – he recently told journalists that he still thinks of making another Jaws movie, and now he’s returning to exploreanother franchise from his past. While it remains doubtful that Spielberg will ever be involved with another shark flick (or that a fifth Jaws film will ever get off the ground), at least Jurassic Park 4 seems like a project with a decent shot at coming to fruition.

The director and studio stress that these are very early brainstorming meetings between Spielberg and Protosevich. The duo has a previous relationship, with Protosevich having worked with Spielberg on his planned westernization of Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy. A series of rights issues eventually killed that project once and for all, but apparently the two enjoyed working together and have teamed up for this project.

The original JP debuted back in 1993. Based on a Michael Crichton novel, the film is remembered for its incredible (at the time) visual effects, which paraded amazingly realistic looking dinosaurs across the screen. The title, along with James Cameron’s Terminator 2, is an important piece of film history if only because it showed what was possible using computer-generated imagery with old school special effects.

The first two films in the series raked in big bucks at the box office, but the third installment – released back in 2001 – didn’t do nearly as well, essentially stopping the series dead in its tracks. This is already leading to speculation that a new Jurassic Park film could be a potential rebooting of the franchise and not just another sequel. It makes sense on some levels – with today’s movie technology and the emergence of 3-D, a remake or reimagining of the original film could be visually impressive. The question is will audiences care? 3-D numbers are down this summer, leading many to wonder if the technology is losing its appeal with viewers.

The bigger question is who would helm such a project? While Spielberg is involved in these early story discussions, it seems unlikely that he’d get back behind the camera to make a new Jurassic Park – although Universal would almost assuredly love it if he did. Only time will tell – but we’ll keep you posted as new Jurassic Park 4 news comes to light.

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Hundreds of prehistoric insects found intact within huge amber deposit

A 50-million-year-old amber deposit discovered in India holds a cornucopia of perfectly preserved ancient insects.

By Bryan Nelson
From http://www.mnn.com/

FROZEN IN TIME: The insects were surprisingly well preserved, with soft tissue still intact. (Photo: sulla55/Flickr)

The 1993 film "Jurassic Park" was based on the premise that scientists were able to extract dinosaur DNA from ancient mosquitoes that fed on the prehistoric reptiles and had been preserved in tree resin. That story line is science fiction, but real scientists have discovered what is being called the largest amber deposit ever found — and it's loaded with perfectly preserved ancient bugs, according to The Independent.

The deposit, which is the first to be discovered in India, is probably larger than the current record holders in the amber-rich Baltic region of Russia, Germany, Ukraine and Poland. Even more valuable than the amber itself, however, is the treasure trove of ancient insects found trapped inside. Prehistoric bees, ants, spiders and mites that become encased within the amber over 50 million years ago can now be studied in unprecedented detail.

Usually bugs found trapped in ancient amber deposits are empty shells, with just their exoskeletons preserved. Their soft inner tissues rarely survive the millennia of decay intact. That's one of the main reasons the fantasy presented in "Jurassic Park" could never become a reality. But the bugs found in the new Indian deposit are different. They're some of the best preserved specimens ever found, with surprisingly well-preserved soft tissues.

"We are able to dissolve the amber and get the specimens completely out," said professor Jes Rust of Bonn University in Germany, who pioneered the effort to uncover the insects. "This is really outstanding. It's like getting a complete dinosaur out of the amber and being able to put it under the microscope."

In reality, these 50-million-year-old bugs would have survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, and would have lived at a time before mammals evolved. Though most of the creatures are ancient species, one species of ant belongs to a genus that is still alive today in Australia.

"The amber shows, similar to an old photo, what life looked like in India just before the collision with the Asian continent. The insects trapped in the fossil resin cast a new light on the history of the sub-continent," Rust said.

In all, 700 specimens have been found in the amber so far, but scientists say they have only just scratched the surface. "There is an enormous volume of amber to be found. This is just the beginning," added Rust.

Will We Clone a Dinosaur?

If you use DNA taken from its myriad wing descendants, the idea is not as farfetched as it first appears

By MATT RIDLEY

The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is definitely not. The Jurassic Park idea „ amber, insects and bits of frog dna „ would not work in a million years, and it was by far the most ingenious suggestion yet made for how to find dinosaur genes. Cloning a mammoth„flash frozen for several thousand years „ might just prove feasible one day. But dinosaurs, 65 million years old? No way.

It is only when you ask the question the third time that you begin to see a glimpse of an affirmative answer. Start with three premises. First, dinosaurs did not die out; indeed there are roughly twice as many species of their descendants still here on Earth as there are mammals, but we call them birds. Second, dna is turning out to be a great deal more "conserved" than anybody ever imagined. So-called Hox genes that lay down the body plan in an embryo are so similar in people and fruit flies that they can be used interchangeably, yet the last common ancestor of people and fruit flies lived about 600 million years ago.

Third, and most exciting, geneticists are finding many "pseudogenes" in human and animal dna „ copies of old, discarded genes. It's a bit like finding the manual for a typewriter bound into the back of the manual for your latest word-processing software. There may be a lot of interesting obsolete instructions hidden in our genes.

Put these three premises together and the implication is clear: the dino genes are still out there. So throw your mind forward a few decades, and try out the following screenplay. A bunch of bioinformatics nerds in Silicon Valley, looking for an eye-catching project to showcase the latest ipo, decide to try to recreate the genome of a dinosaur. They bring together a few complete bird genomes„complete dna texts from the cells of different birds „ and start mapping the shared features. The result is a sort of prototype genome for a basic bird.

Then they start fiddling with it: turning on old pseudogenes; knocking out the genes for feathers and putting back in the genes for scaly skin; tweaking the genes for the skull so that teeth appear instead of a beak; shrinking the wings, keel and wishbone (ostrich genes would be helpful here); massively increasing size and sturdiness of the body; and so on. Pretty soon they have the recipe for a big, featherless, wingless, toothy-jawed monster that looks a little like a cross between a dodo and a tiger.

They might not have to fix that many genes „ just a few hundred mainly developmental ones. The genes for the immune system, for memory mechanisms and the like would all be standard for a vertebrate. To fine-tune the creature, they could go fishing in other bird genomes, or perhaps import a few ideas from lizards and turtles.

Remember, at this stage nothing has left the computer; all they have is a dna recipe. But by the end of this century, if not sooner, biotechnology will have reached the point where it can take just about any dna recipe and read off a passable 3-D interpretation of the animal it will create. After a massive amount of digital trial and error, the nerds reckon they have a recipe for a creature that would closely resemble a small, running dinosaur, such as Struthiomimus ("the ostrich mimic").

The rest is as easy as Dolly the sheep: call up a company that can synthesize the genome, stick it into an enucleated ostrich ovum, implant the same in an ostrich and sit back to watch the fun. Of course, there will be teething troubles - literally. Or somebody might have forgotten to cut out the song bird's voice genes, so the first struth chirps like a sparrow. Or maybe the brain development did not quite hang together and the creature is born incapable of normal movement. As this suggests, the first such experiment will almost certainly produce a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, and the whole idea may well therefore be cruel and unethical, in which case, let us hope it never happens. But that is not the same as saying it will be impossible.

And it just might prove much easier than I am implying. Who knows? Rusty old pseudogenes left over from the great sauropods may still be intact, hidden somewhere in the genes of a hummingbird.