Nothing is cooler than dinosaurs.

They ruled the planet for millions of years, then, mysteriously, they all died. But they left all of their awesome bones in the desert for us to find and daydream about.

As a kid, nothing captured my imagination as much as the movie Jurassic Park. It was the perfect movie. They brought dinosaurs back to life, something I’d been wishing would happen for the first 14 years of my life.

The movie was ridiculous, (-ly awesome) held together by Hollywood ‘science,’ and everyone knew that we could never actually bring extinct dinosaurs back to life…yet.

If you were like me, you always hoped that someday, science would catch up to Hollywood, and create a real life Jurassic Park (or at least the hover-board from Back to the Future 2).

But yesterday my dreams were shattered.

A group of Australian scientists have discovered that DNA has a half-life of about 521 years. So after that amount of time, half of the chemical bonds holding that DNA together would decay, and after another 521 years the bonds would be halved again, and so on and so on.

This means that the oldest usable DNA we could potentially use to bring a creature back to life is a measly one million years old; after that any usable information has all but decayed away.

Sure, this leaves hope for Wooly Mammoths, Sabertooth Tigers, Moas, and other extinct species (I’m looking at you, Dodo), but none of those are nearly as awesome as a full-fledged dinosaur. And if you paid attention in middle school you know that the last dinosaur died about 65 million years ago, just 64 million too late.  Suffice to say, I was crushed.

Now, perhaps it was all a false hope to begin with, and even without the short DNA half-life, bringing back an extinct creature was impossible. Perhaps God planned for the dinosaurs to stay dead, and we would merely be messing with powers greater than ourselves? Or maybe, God gave us the ability to create and learn, and bring back dead dinosaurs somehow?

I had hope before, and I think I still will after this, because I can think of nothing cooler than riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex to work.