How to Build a Dinosaur

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… recommend an excellent book (though that book is now eleven years old and is probably becoming dated by the minute): The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World, or How to Build a Dinosaur by Rob DeSalle and David Lindley You don't need to have read or seen Jurassic Park to appreciate the book. At the risk of providing spoilers: The book is, ultimately, a catalog of reasons why cloning dinosaurs is impossible. ;) The simplest reason is that genetic material is very fragile, but once you get beyond that there are many more entertaining reasons, ranging from the profound (fetal development is dependent on the mother's physiology as well as the child's genetic code -- you quite literally have a chicken-and-egg problem when you're trying to clone an extinct creature) to the surprisingly profound (If a live dinosaur walked outside, could …