That's right, we may all be dino-demented, but I very highly seriously doubt Velociraptor Vacations are going to come to an island near you.
I will be the first to admit that I don't know much about palaeontology, and less about genetics (having the birds and bees talk was bad enough, OK), but I know enough to have an opinion.
SO, let's give the basics of how we get fossils today. Giant comet smashes into the Yucatan Peninsula off the coast of Mexico, and all the plants go "nope, can't take this shit" and spontaneously combust. No kidding, that's genuinely what scientists think happen because of the shock wave coming out of the impact site.
All the herbivores slowly die of starvation, and the carnivores live it up for a few months, maybe a few years, only they end up dying too. So all the dinosaurs end up in the ground, and the calcium, the stuff that makes up their bones, gets slowly replaced by rock. The dinosaurs, in essence, get stoned.
But what happens to the DNA? Well, as the bones become rock, the DNA gets eroded. It becomes as extinct as the dinosaurs it made. In all the time we've known about dinosaurs which is about 100 or 200 years, I've only ever heard of one example of dino DNA actually being found, and even that couldn't make more than Terry the friendly T-Rex dino ghost.
So, dinosaurs unfortunately or otherwise, are dead. For good. At least in my lifetime; Mother Nature may end up pulling a Lazarus the dead man on them.
But what about what came after the dinosaurs? It took about 10 or 15 million years for the dust to settle and by then, the mammals had taken over except for a brief period of man-sized birds ruling the proverbial roost.
But even those early mammals we can't bring back. Scientists reckon that the earliest animals we could conceivably bring back would be from between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago at the absolute farthest, and from 6,000 years ago at the absolute closest.
Which means all of the following are up for coming back: the dodos, mammoths, sabre tooth cats, ptero-birds, cave lions, woolly rhino, the giant elk Megaceros or Megaloceros, the giant ground sloths, and even our own ancestors from the earliest, the Australopithecus, right down to the Neanderthals.
Naturally, I'm as excited as anybody about this. But I think there are some we shouldn't really bring back. The mammoths I think shouldn't come back, because their history is so close to ours. They lived and died alongside us - hell, they were still alive when the Egyptians were building the pyramids (no, I'm not joking!).
I also think we shouldn't try bringing back any of our ancestors, simply because it'd be too confusing: modern humans living alongside the first noticeably human like apes? Gads, it's a headache in the making.
That being said, I can understand bringing back a few of each hominid species for research purposes. Call it cruel, but then curiosity often is. I suppose this is basically summed up by Toba Beta's warning:
"[The] Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered. But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it."
And that is basically why I'm a fan of prehistory. At some point, we're doomed to drop a few notches on the food chain. Like we were in prehistory.
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