The announcement two weeks ago that a small segment of feathered dinosaur tail has been discovered preserved in an amber nugget from Myanmar sparked understandable excitement and the usual Jurassic Park-related anxiety.
Every time some well-preserved bit of of dinosaur pops up there's unfounded speculation about cloning and the Jurassic Park alarmists remind us that when "Man creates dinosaurs," as his character put it, Jeff Goldblum is put at risk and that, as I recall, makes him unusually pedantic and insufferable.
Frankly, I was always surprised Laura Dern's character didn't kill him and make it look like a dinosaur did it. "Yes, sadly, Triceratops are the masterful garroters of the Ceratopsid group and now he's not shirtless and patronizing me any more – I mean, he's dead. You can trust me, officer, I'm a paleontologist."
As it is, a few expendable characters are lost, most of whom had it coming but that film is seared into the public imagination as a warning about the dangers of "playing God," as people like to call it.
This is a shame, really, because, as theme parks go, a dinosaur park is a stellar idea and the problems with the Jurassic Park weren't on the bioengineering end anyway. The issues were more on the tech and design side. The lessons of the park are less about the dangers of "playing God" and more about the risks of hiring the wrong nerd and then not hiring even one other nerd to work with him.
Honestly, Jurassic Park management, if your organization has dinosaurs, I promise you, you can give your nerds free season passes, allow a little caveman cos-play, and all your Jurassic IT needs will be met for life.
Clearly, all the park needed was a back-up generator and how hard is it to design a door that a Velociraptor can't open? Surely the difficulty would lie in building the exact opposite, in constructing some kind of Velociraptor cat-door? Given that Velociraptors were in fact about a metre high and covered in feathers, there might be a commercial demand for such portal should we ever get the big (actually Late Cretaceous) chickens back and decide they're one of the animals we cuddle and not cook.
It's estimated that from 1987 to 2000 there were 4.5 amusement-ride-related deaths per year in the U.S. That means around the time the 1993 film was released, more people were dying annually on theme park rides in America than died in the first Jurassic Park film. Closing the park was a massive overreaction. They didn't close the regular theme parks, and if frightening people – giving them experiences that seldom lives up to their parents' hype or their own expectations and making lots of them sick – isn't "playing God," I don't know what is.
There's precious little dignity dying on a cartoon-themed roller-coaster but on the pro-dinosauria-distractions side, "Man against nature" is a classic conflict. There's a reason Ernest Hemingway did not write The Old Man and the Uninspected Flume Ride but a few glitches at a dinosaur park's soft opening and everyone gets all foreboding about the possibility of getting some dinosaurs back.
Mostly people love to entertain the idea of bringing back an extinct animal. If you're looking for neutral dinner conversation over the holidays, ask everyone at the table if they could bring back one animal from extinction, which animal would that be? I would likely go with the Palaeeudyptes klekowskii because at 1.6 meters (beak down), those penguins were pretty much my height and frankly it's the "Don't want to look a giant penguin directly in the eye" side that have to justify themselves here.
Most people have one in mind and will be only too happy to tell you about it and there's no bad answer, provided of course it's not a dinosaur. Thanks a lot, Steven Spielberg. As if the real blame for most of that drama doesn't lie solidly with the parents who signed their children up for the trip to "Just Waiting on the Insurance Mad Scientist Island" anyway.
We still have game parks where there are occasionally human casualties; it's just death at a dinosaur park that makes people so touchy. Lions, hippos and crocodiles, for example, kill people every year but that, by and large, is not why we keep killing them. We mostly just kill them incidentally. We kill a lot of animals we can't be assed not to kill.
It's not as if giraffes posed any kind of threat to us and yet it was revealed last week that we are rapidly killing them. The latest "red list" of threatened species, released by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, moved the world's tallest terrestrial animal from "least concern," a category they have long occupied, to "vulnerable." This is because we've gone and lost nearly 40 per cent of the world's giraffes in the last 30 years.
This is why we can't have nice things, humanity. We're hemorrhaging giraffes. There's no excuse for this. Could there be a more accommodating animal than the giraffe? Is there another large mammal who has gone quite so far in not wanting to be in the way? Giraffes are entirely delightful. They are an animal a child would mock-up. I look at a giraffe and I see a crayoned blueprint for that ridiculous creature and a parent's bemused smile.
"I like the horns," says Dad, who must always say something.
"They're ossicones," says Child, sighing.
Giraffes aren't exactly underfoot and they are the "If you're not going to eat this …" nom nom nom of animals. They're not fussy about breeding – they're pretty much the anti-pandas. While they prefer mating in the rainy season when they're bored and there's lots of food about, they're not sticklers about it. Like the best of us, they're content to get at it whenever. They need a nice dinner, basically. Eighteen months later, lady giraffes casually drop, literally, a baby so suspiciously tall that if giraffes had birth announcements they would read like dating profiles. "Six feet tall," giraffes, pretty much all of them.
While they can be quite gregarious, giraffes are a quiet animal. There's no mooing, clucking, roaring, oinking or bleating going on with the giraffe. It took careful research to prove that they make a low humming sound, and even then they only do this at night, and it's hardly audible to humans. It's almost as if, with those noble ungulates, the planet had been given some kind of ideal houseguest and what has our response been?
"Oh, let's kill them and barely notice." This is being called a "silent extinction."
We're killing giraffes by encroaching on their habitat and they're dying as a result of our wars. We keep poaching them even though their meat doesn't taste good or fetch a good price. We're losing them even though no sizable group of men ever got it into their heads that any part of a giraffe had had the potential to make their penises hard. Not getting on that particular list is, to any species, like some epic version of escaping jury duty.
The remains of the world's rhino population is trying to evolve in such a way that their hide wrinkles spell out a Viagra ad before it's too late, and too late happens often. There are so many species we just watch slip away and the thing about giraffes is that when they're gone they will be the animal we fantasize about bringing back.
"You know they used to be …" someone will say at some family dinner in not-far-enough-future and they will describe the incredible giraffe to all the wide-eyed listeners, ending with "and it was kind of furry and covered in big spots," to the gasps that this over-the-top touch deserves.
If one day in a giraffe-less world someone found giraffe DNA encased in amber and there was a chance at bringing them back, donations would pour in. It would be seen as a chance not to be missed, so let's do this now. Let's keep our giraffes. There are at least two organizations, The World Wildlife Fund and the Giraffe Conservation Foundation, that will let you symbolically adopt a giraffe for a donation. Some have a stuffie and a certificate option. Maybe this is the Christmas gift you've been looking for, a gift that says, "In your name, I am helping us all avoid posterity's scorn." Maybe right now is the perfect time.