Somebody Wants to Build Jurassic Park

I know this isn’t the kind of story we would usually cover, but listen: there’s this billionaire who really, sincerely wants to build Jurassic Park. Not a Jurassic Park-themed park, but an actual, for real Jurassic Park. He wants to clone dinosaurs, and he’s in serious talks with actual scientists to discuss how to do it. For real:

In other billionaire news today, a controversial and ostentatious Australian is supposedly planning a real-life Jurassic Park, complete with cloned dinosaurs. Clive Palmer, who also wants to build a modern-day Titanic replica, has held talks with the scientists who cloned Dolly the sheep, reports Australia’s Sunshine Coast Daily.

Palmer, a mining magnate, owns a luxury resort on the Sunshine Coast, in southern Queensland on Australia’s Pacific side. He would put the dinosaurs in his new resort there, theDaily reports. There are no named sources in the article about this effort, however, with the newspaper citing someone “close to Palmer’s inner circle.”

Other plans for the resort apparently call for a sky needle and a mega Ferris wheel like the London Eye, and a focus on clientele from the Middle East. But the cloned-dino idea is obviously the most eyebrow-raising. Palmer would not answer questions about it and is holding a press conference on Friday, so we’ll see what he says then.

Palmer said earlier this year that he wanted to build a “Titanic II,” as close a replica as possible to the fated ship but with modern technology. If all goes as he plans, the vessel would sail from London to New York in 2016, according to the BBC.

Palmer would not be the first to discuss cloning dinosaurs. The book and movie “Jurassic Park” certainly popularized the idea, but scientists really are trying to resurrect extinct animals. Researchers in Russia, Korea and Japan say they’re planning to bring mammoths back by injecting their DNA into elephants. (This idea is controversial and doubted by many, to say the least.) There’s not enough dino DNA to do this, but the paleontologist Jack Horner is famously trying to genetically engineer their descendants — birds — to have more dinosaur-like qualities. Perhaps a future Australian seaside resort will play host to flocks of Chickenosaurus, which you can view through self-driving Land Rovers.

YES. Well, yes, as long as there are no raptors. Because f-ck those raptors*. As long as there are no raptors, then this is awesome. In theory, of course. We’ve all seen the movie, of course (and read the book. Have you read the book? I’m almost finished with it), so we all know that eventually some gross employee will screw up everything trying to sell some embryos and the electric fences will go down and a couple of kids will get chased around all night by dinosaurs. And who wants that*?

*A cute thing that my boyfriend does sometimes is he’ll scratch on the window right over the bed when I’m just waking up and go “I THINK I HEAR A RAPTOR.” I get so irrationally terrified, you guys. F-ck those raptors.

**I do. If I could see a real life brontosaurus, I could deal with anything. Sorry, kids, but fulfilling my lifelong dream to play The Land Before Time with a real Littlefoot trumps your terror.