Ricki Lewis

Multiple spoiler alert! 

In the classic film Jurassic Park (JP), disasters unfurl at a theme park populated with dinosaurs cloned from reptile DNA in mosquitoes fossilized in amber, with modern frog DNA filling in gaps. 

Douglas Preston's new novel Extinction – really De-extinction — riffs on the 1993 Steven Speilberg epic, substituting in genetic material from a half dozen mammals from the Pleistocene, circa 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago. The animals were cloned from DNA in tiny, preserved ear bones, and doctored a bit. 

The resulting animals roam a resort nestled into the remote Colorado Rockies, thanks to biotech company Erebus. At sundown, guests gather at a panoramic window in the lodge's lobby to watch the behemoth herbivores wander to a stream, the mammoths especially beloved. 

But unlike Jurassic Park's out-of-control carnivores, the Ice Age bestiary boasts only mellow vegetarians: Irish elk, giant beavers and ground sloths, glyptodonts (armadillos), and woolly rhinoceri and mammoths. The rhino is about the size of a Trader Joe's! 

To continue reading, go to Genetic Literacy Project, where this post first appeared.

One of my favorite places as a child was the American Museum of Natural History. While most kids would rush to the towering dinosaur skeletons, I'd stand, transfixed, at a small glass-enclosed display of skulls and try to envision what their owners had looked like – australopithecines, Neanderthals, a few others. I remember that part of the museum as The Hall of Man; it's now the Hall of Human Origins.

Discovering My First Fossil

I loved the museum, but yearned to discover things myself. That happened when I was in the fourth grade, and my parents took my sister and me to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. We couldn't have cared less about baseball. But behind the motel, we waded in a stream, where the angle of the sun on the wet rocks revealed striking patterns of stripes. I picked one up, and realized that it wasn't an ordinary rock.

It was a fossil. Edith and I spent the weekend collecting.

To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.