Search This Blog

Thursday, October 17, 2013

SF To Science Fact: Michael Crichton's Mosquito

Anyone out there read the novel Jurassic Park? I did, a while before the movie came out. Remember the mosquito trapped in amber with a bellyful of blood and they used the DNA to create a dinosaur? Well, they've found a fossil prehistoric mosquito with a bellyful of blood, though they won't be creating dinosaurs any time soon. For one thing, it was about twenty million years after the last dinosaurs  died out. For another, the DNA wouldn't have lasted.

Still, it's exciting. And it was lurking in someone's basement in Montana, US., for about twenty years.  I love it when science fiction becomes science fact, which it has been doing for a very long time now. For example, those mobile phones with the flip tops. The inventor admits he got the idea from the original Star Trek communicators. We'd never have had them if Captain Kirk and his crew had tapped their shoulder gadgets to contact each other, as they did in the later series. And floppy disks, which we admittedly don't use any more, first appeared in Star Trek. And then there was Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe, which predicted the Internet, back in the 1940s.

Is it any wonder I love science and science fction?

2 comments:

Sheeprustler said...

It certainly sent a shiver down my spine when I heard it! I read the book well before the film came out, too.

Sue Bursztynski said...

Not likely, Judy. Any DNA is degraded and the only reason they knew it had blood in it was because of the iron levels.