Clive Palmer Plans a Real Jurassic Park
Clive Palmer, an eccentric mining billionaire from Queensland, Australia, has been rumored to be planning a real-life Jurassic Park tourist attraction, an add on for his $3 billion luxury Palmer resort on the Sunshine Coast in Southern Queensland, north of Brisbane.
This isn’t the first ambitious goal (read: wacky idea) that Palmer has had. Earlier in the year he said he wanted to build a replica of the Titanic for modern-day use, and if his plans go through the Titanic II will sail from London to New York in 2016.
It is said that Palmer’s latest plans for the real Jurassic Park resort, which already has 9 swimming pools and a golf-course, would feature a dinosaur-park area with fenced-in enclosures to house the cloned dinosaurs forming a real-life version of the 1993 movie Jurassic Park.
Palmer In Talks with Clone Scientists For His Real Jurassic Park
Described as being a controversial and ostentatious man, it has been rumored that the wealthy Australian has been in deep talks with a clone research institute and the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep to see if they would be able to make his dreams of cloning a dinosaur, reality.
No sources have been named, the press only citing “someone close to Palmer’s inner circle” has released the information so it’s unsure how true these plans, or rumors actually are, or whether Palmer’s plans for a real Jurassic Park could ever come to fruition.
A Precursor to the Real Jurassic Park: Scientists Bringing Mammoths Back to Life
Cloning dinosaurs sounds outrageous but Palmer has not been the first person to discuss the idea. The movie “Jurassic Park” first popularized the concept but it’s true that scientists really are trying to resurrect extinct animals.
Scientists and researchers in Japan, Korea and Russia say that they’re planning to bring mammoths back from extinction by injecting their DNA into elephants. This is a controversial idea and so far has not been realized, but who knows what will happen in the future..
Scientists say there’s currently not enough dinosaur DNA to do the same thing with dinosaurs, though palaeontologist Jack Horner is working on genetically engineering dinosaur descendants – birds – to realize their dinosaur-like qualities…
Palmer’s Real Jurassic Park Outlandish Plans Expanded
The real life Jurassic Park is not Palmer’s only outlandish plan for the resort though. Aimed at clientele from the Middle East the resort could instead house replicas of monuments and tourist attraction from around the world including the Sky Needle and the London Eye. There are also plans for a, more likely, casino complex though more unusually one that comes complete with hovercraft port and international airport.
For several days Palmer neither confirmed nor denied the rumors for a real Jurassic Park but on August 3rd in a press conference he detailed what his actual plans were for the Palmer Resort and, sadly, or not, (depending on your views!), dinosaurs are off the list. Palmer personally denied claims that he was going to clone dinosaurs for a real-life Jurassic Park saying “It’s just a beat-up of a story and untrue”.
The Impossibility of a Real Jurassic Park
The Roslin Institute that works on cloning has said that resurrecting dinosaurs would be difficult for a number of reasons. First a surrogate mother to carry a baby dinosaur would be difficult to find. Secondly it’s unlikely that whole dinosaur cells still exist (even if the dinosaur carcass happened to be frozen,) and lastly over 100,000 whole dinosaur cells would be needed in order to even make an attempt at resurrecting these giants.
So there’s no need to panic – Dinosaurs won’t be coming back to life at least not as a result of Palmer’s “real Jurassic Park” !
