Conference noted::sf

    see 244.32
    
    len.
    

    I heard about the movie when the book first came out. Seems to be about
    2 years away at the moment. I gave a recommendation in 244.? and feel
    that it was a well done book with the possibility that it COULD be done
    with current/near technology. I worked for Symbolics in Cambridge
    (mentioned in the book) and we dealt with the genetic engineering
    people in the surrounding buildings. Many of them were itching to do
    something similar to the book. I got it for Xmas in hardback and read
    it straight through. The book is about a dinosaur zoo and the
    technology to create it and the trials and tribulations of making it
    happen. Great method for getting 70 million year old DNA 8^)

    The hurricane that just laid waste to Kaui also forced the "Jurassic
    Park" crew to evacuate the island... Don't know what it'll do to their
    schedule (though of course that's an insignificant problem compared to
    the troubles of the people who lost their homes - over a third of the
    island's population, I gather).
    
    On the lighter side (or _is_ it?), I found the following in the paper
    recently:
    
    BERKELEY, Calif. - The genetic makeup of insects entombed in fossilized
    amber could shed light on dinosaurs.
    
    Researchers say they have cloned a fragment of genetic matter by
    patching together bits of DNA from extinct stingerless bees entombed in
    amber more than 25 million years ago. They hope the technique will
    yield dinosaur DNA from another ancient insect that may have eaten
    dinosaur blood.
    
    The discovery shows that "DNA can actually sit around for...millions of
    years and still retain enough of its activity to be sequenced," said
    entomology professor George O. Poinar of the University of California
    at Berkeley.
    
    -b

    Steven Spielberg's thriller based on this book is scheduled to
    be released June 11, and is expected to be this summer's blockbuster.
    The countdown begins!

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "John Matrow" 
        5-MAY-1993 01:42:15.59 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	TIME/JURASSIC PARK

From TIME, 4/26/93 "Behind the Magic of JURASSIC PARK" by Richard Corliss

. 
. 
. 
"We were trying to be credible," co-producer Kathleen Kennedy says. 
"But we were also making a movie." So they took a little artistic license.
VELOCIRAPTOR,...was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But
because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villians, the
Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. The choice was
scientifically defensible, since so few specimens had been found that
generalizations were hard to come by. Anyway, what did books know? Then
a surprising thing happened. In Utah, paleontologists found bones of a
real raptor, and it was the size of the movie's beast. [UTAHRAPTOR?]
"We were cutting edge," says the film's chief modelmaker, Stan Winston,
with a pathfinder's pride. "After we created it, they discovered it."
. 
. 
. 
Spielberg... made the movie and even donated $25,000 to the Dinosaur
Society. (In return, the society renamed the oldest known ankylosaur
"Jurassosaurus nedegoapeferkimorum"; part of the second word is an
acronym of the surnames of the film's cast.)
. 
. 
. 
Last month an educational poster on dinosaurs, produced by New York's
American Museum of Natural History, was mailed free to 7 million
schoolchildren, courtesy of McDonald's-which will also be handing out
JURASSIC PARK mugs at the local franchises. 
. 
. 
. 
Also on hand was Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at Montana State
University's Museum of the Rockies and Crichton's model for the book's
hero-though Horner wryly notes that Alan Grant is "better funded." He
advised on every creature feature, from head (they often lost teeth) to
foot (when they walked, the heel, not the toe, hit the ground first.)
"They have detail inside the T.REX's mouth that no one has ever seen.
It's a guess-a best guess. And a lot of adults will be surprised that
dinosaurs don't drag their tails," Horner says. "But the kids will
know it's right."
. 
. 
. 
-- 
John Matrow   Product Solutions, NCR Peripheral Products Division
 316-636-8851 <[email protected]>
 FAX:636-8889 "Call 316-636-8628 to have array info faxed to you"
 NCR:654-8851 "Call 303-499-7111 for a good time"

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Subject: TIME/JURASSIC PARK
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Tue, 4 May 93 12:43:58 CDT
% From: John Matrow <[email protected]>

> VELOCIRAPTOR,...was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But
> because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villians, the
> Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. 

I was disappointed when I read the velociraptors were going to be made
20 feet tall (I don't recall where I saw this).
Even a nine foot tall version is a letdown for me.
The real suspense and FEAR of the novel is, in large part, that the
super predator is no bigger than the people.
(T Rex isn't the super predator - it's just the big lumbering monster.
Again, the suspense and fear from the novel come from the intelligence 
and teamwork of the velociraptors.)
Recall the climactis scenes from the novel inside the hotel and labs.
With 20 foot, or even 9 foot monsters, the hiding places and safe refuges
for people are much more a possibility.  How can you hide from something
that can go EVERYWHERE that you can?

Five foot tall velociraptors would have been optimal for my tastes.

- tom]

(but I've been disappointed by every Spielberg project that followed "Duel")

    
    I agree - wish they could have kept the beasties human-sized - made for
    an exciting read, anyways.
    
    Looking forward to the movie, however . . .
    
    
    					- Jim
    

    >I agree - wish they could have kept the beasties human-sized - made for
    >an exciting read, anyways.
    
    People would compare them (unfavorably, too, I'd guess) to Ripley's
    nemisis -- the Aliens.  
    
    Nine feet and FAST is going to be very, very scary.

    re: velociraptors
    
    According to an article I read in Time or Newsweek on JP, a large
    version of velociraptor has apparently been found - life imitating art
    again.
    
    /Butch

Probably the Time article mentioned in .5

re .5

Is this a case of life imitating art, or art imitiating life imitating
ar, or...

I think it was in _Starfarers_ that someone from the Art Department was
very carefully constructing and burying a fossil bed in materials mined
from the moon.  Someone asked him what would happen if people forgot
about the bed and then a later generation "discovered" fossils from the
moon.  The artist thought that would be the ultimate "recognition" of
the art form...


John B.

    Expecting a movie to be as "good" as the book upon which it's based
    is asking for disappointment, in my opinion.  I'v decided that it's
    best to keep an open mind and think of them as related rather
    than the same -- both media have their strong points which are mutually
    exclusive; in order to exploit them imaginatively, they *have* to be
    subtly different.

    I read Arthur Clarke's "2001" only a couple years or so back,
    and at someone's recommendation watched the video afterwards.  'Course,
    just Clarke's writing style in his better work is something that no
    movie has means to live up to but even so it came as a real
    letdown -- corny, slow and uninteresting, compared to the book.

    So I'm going to try to forget Crichton's book and enjoy the movie
    on its own merits.  Besides, with Steven Spielberg at the helm, how
    bad could it be??

    Anil

>    So I'm going to try to forget Crichton's book and enjoy the movie
>    on its own merits.  

Good advice - I'm often noted that there's no way a novel can be adequately
expressed in 100-150 minutes of film.  That does out to be about the right
length of time to present a short story that's literally true to its roots.

>    Besides, with Steven Spielberg at the helm, how
>    bad could it be??

It could suck wind and die if presented from the point of view of the kids
in the story, which is Spielberg's repeated style.
As I said earlier, I've been disappointed in every Spielberg effort
after "Duel," the maniacal truck/driver saga of the late '70s.

ET (for example) sucked, and if Jurassic Park turns out to be focused 
on the nine(?) year old kid, I'll be really pissed.

- tom]

    	DUEL came out in or around 1972, I believe.
    

    If the point of view changed to that of the kids, that would
    certainly spoil it somewhat.
    
    "Duel" is probably one of the most harrowing movies I've seen.
    Wasn't it Spielberg's first real film?  I remember thinking
    at the time that it was very uncharacteristic..
    
    Anil

The ad campaign has started.

June 11th, 1993
with a T-Rex in cameo

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke" 25-MAY-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Recent Articles on Jurassic Park and Amber

Here is a listing of some recent articles about Jurasic
Park/Dinosaurs/Amber from the past 6 months or so that I thought would
be of interest to this group. Being an avid amber collector, and I'm
always on the lookout for these type of articles.  This list is by no
means complete, so anyone can feel free to add to the list. 

   o "Reseachers Look to Extinct Bee's Genes For Key to Dinosaurs' Secret",
     San Francisco Chronical, date unknown but in late 1992.  An article
     about George Poinar and Raul Cano extracting DNA from a stingles bee
     entrapped in amber.  The bee is estimated to be about 25 million years
     old.  Mention of Cano's gene-sequencing lab already been used in the
     filming for Jurassic Park.

   o "Brushing the Dust Off Ancient DNA", Science News, October 24, 1992.
     Front cover of the magazine shows a closeup photo of the stingless bee
     in amber from which DNA was extracted.  Two page article about amber,
     DNA, dinosaurs and Jurassic Park.  Includes one additional photo of an
     extint termite in amber.

   o "Millipedes in Amber", Lapidary Journal, November 1992.  Three page
     article about millipedes in amber.  Includes two excellent photos
     of millipedes in amber.  One of them is quite spectacular with a
     lot of hair.  Anyone know where I can get one like this?

   o "Insects in Amber",  Annual Review Entomology, 1993, by George Poinar.
     Thirteen page article describing insects in amber.  Very well written,
     pages are small, but a lot of material is covered.  Includes 11 photos
     of amber inclusions.  This article is kind of a condensed version of
     Dr. Poinar's book, "Life in Amber", which came out last year.

   o "Treasured In Its Own Right, Amber Is a Golden Window On The Long Ago",
     Smithsonian, January 1993.  Featured on the front cover of the magazine
     is an impressive amber piece that contains about 1000 ants.   Long 11 page
     article on amber including 6 photos of amber inclusions and a photo
     from a scene in Jurassic Park.  The article also talks a lot about the
     amber room which disappeared in World War II.

   o "Amber-trapped Creatures Show Timeless Form", Science News, January 16,
     1993.  Small article announcing the discovery by George Poinar of a
     220 million year old microorganism preserved in amber.  One of the
     protozoan appears to be in a middle of a meal.  Mention of a technical
     report of the find in the January 8 issue of Science.

   o "Jurassic Ankylosaur Named For Actors", Lapidary Journal, April 1993.
     One page article about a anklyosaur discoverted in China named after the
     the actors in Jurassic Park.  Spielberg had donated $25,000 to the
     Dinosaur Society which helped in the discovery.  Two photos of scenes
     from Jurassic Park.

   o "Redesigning Dinosaurs", Time, April 26, 1993.  The cover of the magazine
     shows an artist's depiction of a one-clawed bird-like dinosaur recently
     discovered in Mongolia.  An 8-page article about dinosaurs concentrating
     on the more recent discoveries made in the past 10 years which had
     radically changed our views in dinosaurs.  Includes 6 photos of
     dinosaurs and illustrations.

     "Behind the Magic of Jurassic Park", companion two page article to the
     article above.  Talks about Jurassic Park (what else?) includes
     pictures of two scenes from the movie.

   o "Forever in Amber", Natural History, June 1993, by David Grimaldi.  Four
     page article on DNA research in amber including 5 photos of amber
     inclusions.  Excellent photos of a termite and a centipede.   David
     Grimaldi and his team was successful in extracting DNA from a 30 million
     year old termite in amber last year.

   o "Resurrecting the Dinosaur", Omni, June 1993.  Front cover of the magazine
     shows dinosaurs.  One page article on Dr. Poinar's DNA research with
     amber.  Small photo of Dr. Poinar and also of a midge in amber.  Dr.
     Poinar's photo is the one on the top.

     "Designing Dinosaurs: How to Bring Jurassic Park to Life".  Five page
     article on Jurassic Park, the best I've seen so far on the movie.
     Two photos of the scenes from the movie included.

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date:    Tue, 25 May 1993 5:59:37 GMT+0000
% From: Ron Baalke <[email protected]>
% Subject: Recent Articles on Jurassic Park and Amber
% To: [email protected]

    
    What "Amber room" and where did it dissappear to duing WWII??
    
    Just curious..
    Jamd

    
    	The Amber Room was in the Russian palace of Peterhof outside of
    Leningrad.  The Nazis looted the place during the occupation.  The
    walls of the Amber Room were never found.  Rumors have it last being
    seen in the area of Konigsburg during the last days of the war. 
    Possibly is was buried (sites have been postulated in many places
    between there and eastern Germany), possibly it went down on a ship
    that was sunk as it made its escape from Konigsburg.  Some people are still
    searching for it.

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "John Matrow" 26-MAY-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	JURASSIC PARK Star List

Take this to the movie with you and play "Spot the Stars".

Apatosaur		L. Cretacious
Dilophosaur		E. Jurassic
Euoplocephalid		L. Cretacious
Hadrosaur		L. Cretacious
Hysilophodontid		L. Cretacious
Maiasaur		E. Cretacious
Microceratops		L. Cretacious
Othnielia		L. Jurassic
Procompsognathid	L. Triassic
Pterosaur		L. Jur - L. Cret.
Stegosaur		L. Jurassic
Styracosaur		L. Cretacious
Tyrannosaur		L. Cretacious
Triceratops		L. Cretacious
Velociraptor		L. Cretacious

-- 
John Matrow   Product Solutions, NCR Peripheral Products Division
 316-636-8851 <[email protected]>
 FAX:636-8889 "Call 316-636-8628 to have array info faxed to you"
 NCR:654-8851 "Call 303-499-7111 for a good time"

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Subject: JURASSIC PARK Star List
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Wed, 26 May 93 11:08:48 CDT
% From: John Matrow <[email protected]>

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "MAIL-11 Daemon" 27-MAY-1993 
To:	John Matrow <[email protected]>
CC:	
Subj:	Re: JURASSIC PARK Star List

This was cute, but there's a couple of errors in dating and spellin,
and anyway, I think it's more interesting if we make a few notes about
what kind of dinosaur they are.  I think most of us won't recognize a
"euoplocephalid", for example, but we would recognize an ankylosaur. 

So, this should help.  Source is _The Dinosauria_, which has been referred
to before in this list. (Thanks, Dr. Weishampel!)

Pterosaur			Pterosaur		L. Jur - L. Cret.

Dinosaurs:

Saurischian
    Sauropod			Apatosaurus		L. Jurassic
    Theropod
      	?			Procompsognathus	L. Triassic
	Ceratosaur		Dilophosaurus		E. Jurassic
	Tetanurae
	    Dromaeosaur		Velociraptor		L. Cretaceous
	    Carnosaur		Tyrannosaurus		L. Cretaceous

Ornithischian
    Thyreophora
	Ankylosaur		Euoplocephalus		L. Cretaceous
	Stegosaur		Stegosaurus		L. Jurassic
    Cerapoda
	Ornithopoda
	    Hypsilophodontid
				Othnielia		L. Jurassic
				Hypsilophodon		E. Cretaceous
	    Hadrosaur
				Maiasaura		L. Cretaceous
				Hadrosaurus		L. Cretaceous
	Marginocephalia
	    Ceratopsian
		Protoceratopsid
				Microceratops		L. Cretaceous
		Ceratopsid
				Styracosaurus		L. Cretaceous
				Triceratops		L. Cretaceous

-- 
Bob Myers                               Unocal Energy Resources Division
Internet: [email protected]       P. O. Box 68076
Phone: [714] 693-6951                   Anaheim, California  92817-8076

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% From: Bob Myers <[email protected]>
% Date: Wed, 26 May 1993 17:59:22 -0700
% Organization: Unocal Exploration and Seismic Technology
% Subject: Re: JURASSIC PARK Star List

Why I'm worried (see .13)...

There's coverage of JP in the July 1993 issue of Science Fiction Age
(a rag if ever there was one, but that's a different story...).
There are quotes from Kathleen Kennedy, producer of the film.

"When people see 'a Steven Spielberg film' above the title, they have an idea
in their heads of what they want the movie to be.  This movie has every single
bit of that."

"...John Hammond is [an Everyman] ... His grandchildren are very 
much a part of the story, too.  Most every child who goes to see this movie
can identify with the kids in this picture and with the whole notion
of going to an outdoor zoo/combination theme park where they get to see 
live dinosaurs instead of lions, tigers and bears."

In reacting to the tone of the movie, Kennedy says
"Yes, the book, in many respects, has an edge to it, a terror to it, 
but to make that kind of movie would have necessitated making a R-rated movie
that children could not see.  Steven is not doing that.  Steven is making
a movie that is very accessible to all ages."

Curmudgeon that I am, I guess I'm expecting "more mush from the wimp,"
to use that oft-quoted political phrase.......

- tom]

Article: 3324
From: [email protected] (DAVE McNARY, UPI Business Writer)
Newsgroups: clari.biz.products,clari.news.movies
Subject: Universal to open 'Jurassic Park' one day early
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 15:12:24 PDT
 
	LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- Universal Studios, signaling it may have
a major hit on its hands, said Friday it will open its potential
blockbuster ``Jurassic Park'' for previews a day earlier than its
previously announced debut. 

	The dinosaur thriller, based on the novel by Michael Crichton and
directed by Steven Speilberg, will open on June 10 at more than 1,500 of
the 2,400 screens exhibiting the film in its initial run. Most of the
advance preview screenings will start at 10 p.m.

	Opening a film to preview screenings is not unprecedented. Warner
Bros. made such a move to herald the opening of its 1989 hit ``Batman,''
which went on to gross $251 million domestically.

	Universal, a unit of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., said
advance ticket sales for the film have reached record levels
nationwide, prompting many theaters to set additional screenings on
opening week. 

	``As moviegoers are now seeing for themselves in our trailers and TV
spots, 'Jurassic Park' does indeed take audiences into a world they've
never seen before,'' said Thomas P. Pollock, chairman of the MCA Motion
Picture Group. ``Now that their appetites have been whetted, people are
more eager than ever to see the film in its entirety.''

	The film, carrying a reported price tag of $75 million to $100
million, stars Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Richard
Attenborough. In it, dinosaurs that have been genetically re-created
break out of their theme park park after the safety system fails.

	Since Matshushita acquired Universal's parent MCA Inc. for $6.6
billion in early 1991, the studio has not had a big hit film. Its
biggest movies since then have been ``Backdraft,'' which grossed $78
million domestically, and ``Scent of a Woman,'' which recently topped
$61 million.

	Matsushita executives have indicated that they do not want to
interfere to a significant degree with the operations of the studio. But
rumors have emerged that if ``Jurassic Park'' is not a major hit,
Pollock will lose his job.

	Still, ``Jurassic Park'' is expected by some analysts to have the
potential to gross $200 million in the United States alone and match
that figure overseas. It will face off on June 18 with the summer's
other leading contender for blockbuster status, Columbia's ``Last Action
Hero,'' starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Jonathan Kroll"  5-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Jack Horner at Field Museum

For those who may be interested in hearing about it, I recently saw
Jack Horner speak at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago
about two weeks ago.  Horner, as we all know, is perhaps THE eminant
paleontologist in the world at this point, having discovered the first
known dinosaur eggs in the western hemisphere and, more recently, the
most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever.  He is also infamously
known as the real-world model for Alan Grant in Michael Crichton's
Jurassic Park. 

Anyway, Horner came to speak at the Field about his recent unearthing
of a nearly complete T-rex skeleton in the Montana Badlands, which he
detailed in his new book with Don Lessem, _The Complete T-Rex_.  (The
book is fairly thourough and quite readable -- I highly recommend it) 
He talked briefly about the dig and new finding in T-rex's anatomy,
but spent most of his hour-long talk arguing (or playing the devil's
advocate perhaps?) for the newly developed theory that T-rex could
have been, for the most part, a scavenger, rather than a hunter of his
own food.  If that doesn't completely disillusion dinosaur fans
everywhere, I don't know what would.  He then encouraged the audience
to argue about this hypothesis with him, and spent about twenty
minutes fielding questions from the audience. 

He frequently made references throughout his talk to Spielberg's
Jurassic Park, for which he served as a technical advisor.  The
Tyrannosaurus in the movie, he remarked whistfully, will not be a
scavenger, but rather will be seen as the traditional voracious
hunter.  Among other technical advice he gave to Steven (they're on a
first name basis it seems) was to have one of the T-Rex's teeth break
off in the leg of one of the characters when he is bitten (I think it
was Jeff Goldblum), since its teeth were so brittle. It'll be
interesting to see if this makes it into the movie. 

Just thought I'd share that with y'all.  Hope it was interesting.

Jon Kroll
[email protected]

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% From: Jonathan Kroll <[email protected]>
% Subject: Jack Horner at Field Museum
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 23:49:07 -0500 (CDT)

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke"  8-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Scientists Fret About 'Jurassic Park' Message

Scientists Fret About 'Jurassic Park' Message
By Malcolm W. Browne, The New York Times		May 11, 1993
Copyright (C) 1993 The New York Times

In a few weeks, its promoters hope, crowds of dinosaur fans will pack
theaters to watch "Jurassic Park", Steven Spielberg's $56 million
dinosaur movie, the most ambitious Mesozoic-monster film ever made. 
Based partly on recent advances in microbiology, the movie's visual
thrills and state-of-the-art animation may leave audiences gasping. 

Scientists seem as eager as anyone else to see the highly publicized
film, which incorporates some of the latest discoveries about the
preservation of the DNA of extinct animals.  But many microbiologists
are critical of the movie's speculative premises that dinosaurs might
one day be resurrected from the dead.  Some scientists are also uneasy
about what they perceive as an anti-science bias in the plot, a charge
that the author himself acknowledges. 

In its attack on biotechnology, they say, "Jurassic Park" revives the
Frankenstein image of amoral scientists unleashing forces they cannot
control.  The cinematic re-creation of animals that have been extinct
for 65 million years will enchant viewers, they argue, making the
movie's anti-science message all the more potent. 

Although the movie features a number of well-known stars, including
Jeff Goldblum as a doom-saying mathematician and Richard Attenborough
as a billionaire Texas entrepreneur, the real stars are the dinosaurs
themselves, re-created by the latest movie technology.  The scientific
gimmicks on which the story is based were thought up by real
scientists who know something about the obstacles that would have to
be surmounted to bring 80-million-year-old fossils back to life.  Some
of them also worked on the film as advisers to the model builders,
robotics experts, artists and computer animators. 

"Jurassic Park" is based on Michael Crichton's 1990 best seller of the
same name, whose ingenious premise is that mosquitoes and flies back
in the Mesozoic era (230 to 65 million years ago) must sometimes have
drawn blood from dinosaurs before alighting on fresh tree resin and
getting stuck and, ultimately, fossilized.  After the dried resin
hardened into amber, these insects -- and their last meals of blood,
it is supposed -- were sometimes preserved so perfectly that they
remained more or less intact down to the present day. 

From the notion that preserved dinosaur blood may still exist in the
bellies of amberized mosquitoes, it was just a short fictional hop
(albeit a well- nigh impossible scientific leap) to cloned dinosaurs,
mayhem and a best-selling thriller. 

There is some dispute as to who first made the conjectural connection
between bugs in amber and revivified dinosaurs, but there seems to be
no question that Dr. Charles R. Pellegrino of Rockville Center, N.Y.,
was the first to publish the idea.  Dr. Pellegrino, a writer of
science fiction and nonfiction, hold a Ph.D. in paleobiology, and has
long been interested in insects in amber.  In 1977, he was shown a fly
that had been embedded in New Jersey amber for 95 million years, and
it started a train of thought. 

In the March 1985 issue of Omni, a magazine that blends real science
with fiction, Dr. Pellegrino wrote, "Three more decades of technological 
advance and we may be able to extract and read DNA from the flies' 
stomach, where, if we are lucky, we will find the blood and skin of 
dinosaurs." 

Since flies flew among and occasionally drew their nourishment from
dinosaurs, he went on, it is possible that scientists may one day
publish the genetic codes of creatures known only from their bones and
footprints. 

Hatching a Dinosaur

"If portions of the code are missing," he wrote, "we might conceivably
figure out what belongs in the gaps and edit in the 'paragraphs'. 
Perhaps we could borrow from currently living animals to provide a
complete set of proteins necessary for the survival of the original
dinosaur.  Then everything that goes into the building a dinosaur
could be published in the form of chromosomes.  We could insert these
into a cell nucleus, provide a yolk and an eggshell, and hatch our own
dinosaur." 

Microbiologists regard this idea as wildly implausible, pointing out
that no one has yet succeeded in cloning even a living animal with an
intact genetic code, much less an extinct one whose genes have been
mostly destroyed or damaged. 

Dr. Russell Higuchi of Roche Molecular Systems Inc., in Alameda,
Calif., a leading expert in genetic microbiology, recently circulated
a condemnation of "Jurassic Park" to scientific colleagues.  Both the
book and movie, he wrote, contain "gross overstatements of the
capabilities of DNA technology" that "lead to unreasonable fear" of
it.  According to this line of reasoning, he said, "If dinosaurs can
be brought back to life, who knows what other evils gene technology
may be capable of?" 

"Jurassic Park" would have been complete fantasy, had there not been
some breathtaking scientific advances during the 1980's, one of the
most startling of which was made by Dr. George O. Poinar Jr., an
insect pathologist at the University of California at Berkeley.  In
1962 Dr. Poinar was strolling along a stretch of Denmark's western
coast when he discovered a chunk of amber that had washed ashore. 
Starting with that find, amber collecting became a hobby for Dr.
Poinar. 

Window Into Past

Twenty years later it became his life work, and he now calls amber his
"golden window" into the past. 

That year, he and his wife, Dr. Roberta Hess, a microscopist in the
entomology department at Berkeley, acquired a fungus gnat embedded in
amber that had been mined from a rocky sediment known to be 40 million
years old, and they went to work on it.  To start, the two scientists
placed their amber chunk on the stage of an ordinary microscope, expecting 
to see little more than the outline of the fossilized insect parts. 

"Instead, we observed dark areas within the outline, indicating that
the body of the organism itself, not an impression or a fossil, was
inside the amber," Dr. Poinar recalled in last month's issue of The
Sciences, a magazine published by the New York Academy of Sciences. 

Moving their specimen to a vastly more powerful electron microscope,
Dr. Poinar and Dr. Hess were amazed to find that they could clearly
discern the gnat's muscle cells.  They could see the nuclei,
containing chromatin (which carries the cell's genes) and
mitochondria, which provide a cell with its power.  Mitochondria
contain a special type of DNA, believed to descend only through the
female line, which may be a useful indicator of an organism's
evolutionary background. 

The idea of extracting and analyzing DNA from mummified tissues was
largely speculative at that time, but in 1984 another great technical
achievement put the speculation on more solid ground.  That year three
biochemists at Berkeley -- Dr. Allan C. Wilson, Dr. Higuchi (who later
joined Roche Molecular Systems) and Dr. Svante Paabo -- went to work
on the preserved skin of an aminal that had been extinct for 140 years. 

Their subject was a quagga, a brown, horselike beast with zebra
stripes on the front of its body, which inhabited South Africa until
it was exterminated by hunters in the early 19th century.  After
cutting some samples from a quagga skin preserved in a German museum,
the scientists managed to extract enough DNA from the animal's flesh
to determine some of its sequence of "base pairs", the molecular rungs
that link the spiral halves of a DNA molecule. 

The Berkeley group compared quagga DNA with comparable sequences from
related animal species, and found that the quagga was only distantly
related to the common horse and was a much closer kin to the modern
plains zebra.  Dr. Wilson and his colleagues thus settled an old
zoological argument about the antecedents of the quagga, but more
important, they demonstrated that it is possible to make useful
discoveries from old DNA. 

Unfortunately, such specimens rarely contain much recoverable DNA;
there is generally far too little of it left to analyze, and what
little there may be is usually badly degraded.  But in 1985,
biochemists at the Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, Calif., invented
and patented a process that has revolutionized microbiology and the
study of DNA.  Called the polymerase chain reaction (P.C.R.), it can
take a selected piece of a DNA molecule and make trillions of exact
copies in a matter of hours -- enough for a scientist to analyze. 

Once P.C.R. was available, biologists began exploring the genetic
codes of all kinds of fossil and mummified material containing only
the faintest traces of DNA -- 17 million-year-old fossil leaves,
ancient Andean corn, flightless New Zealand birds, a 40,000-year-old
mammoth, the mummified brains of 7,500-year-old Florida Indians and
much more. 

Last year two research groups independently recovered and analyzed
fragments of insect DNA some 40 million years old, not quite as old as
the dinosaurs (which died out 65 million years ago), but very old indeed. 

One group, headed by Dr. Poinar and including his son Hendrik, and Dr.
Raul J. Cano of California Polytechnical Institute and Dr. David W.
Roubik of the Smithsonian Institution, got their DNA from a
40-million-year-old extinct stingless bee found in amber mined in the
Dominican Republic. The other group, Dr. Rob DeSalle, Dr. Ward Wheeler
and Dr. David Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History in
New York, and Dr. John Gatesy of Yale University, worked on Dominican
amber containing an extinct termite. 

The museum's analysis of the termite's DNA challenges a prior belief
that termites evolved from cockroaches; its DNA suggests that termites
and roaches evolved independently of each other, from some common ancestor. 

Novelist Enters Picture

While all this is fascinating science that has greatly enlivened
professional meetings and journals, it falls hopelessly short of
bringing dinosaurs back to life.  Still, fiction can always find a
way.  Enter Michael Crichton. 

Dr. Crichton, the author of "The Andromeda Strain" and other popular
science novels and screenplays, holds a medical degree, as did Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle.  "We're both failed doctors who found storytelling
more congenial than healing," he said in a recent interview.  "Sometimes 
I think I've devoted my life to rewrite Conan Doyle in different ways." 

Both the book and the movie draw from the work and personality of Jack
Horner, the Montana paleontologist who discovered that some dinosaurs
apparently looked after their young in colonies, rather than merely
laying eggs and abandoning them.  Besides serving as a model for one
of the characters in the book, he later worked as an advisor to the
movie makers on dinosaur musculature and movement, and on the
apperance of real field laboratories.  In return, Mr. Horner and his
Montana colleagues have been promised research support from Mr.
Spielberg's Amblin organization. 

Microbiologists view "Jurassic Park" as a veiled attack on science,
and Dr. Crichton himself acknowledges an anti-science undertone in
most of his novels, including "Jurassic Park".  "I'm surprised more
people haven't noticed it more than they have," he said in an
interview.  "I'm enthusiastic about science, but there is a growing
tendency toward scientism -- unthinking acceptance of scientific
ideas, and a tendency to discount ideas that science can't address." 

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date:    Tue, 8 Jun 1993 15:04:17 GMT+0000
% From: [email protected] (Ron Baalke)
% Subject: Scientists Fret About 'Jurassic Park' Message
% To: [email protected]

    On the academic plane, the objections to cloning dinosaurs are as
    irrelevant to SF as objections to hyperdrive coming from a physicist.
    
    On the political side, I think the anti-science tone can be more than
    offset if the movie just contains either a heroic scientist or a
    lovable dinosaur.  It needn't be *very* lovable; people already love
    dinosaurs.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    re .25
    
    It's not true that objections are irrelevant--if it's truely impossible
    than JP is fantasy, not SF ("Oh no, not that argument again!"). 
    Hyperspace works as SF because there is a faint possibility that it's
    real; ditto dinosaur re-creations.
    
    Personally, when distinguished scientists say it's impossible, I'm
    encouraged (c.f. Asimov's quote that "when a distinguished elderly
    scientist says something is possible, he is correct; when a
    distinguished elderly scientist says something is impossible, he
    is often incorrect".  ["he"?  Isaac said this some time ago, but
    it grates a bit now.]).
    
    I expect to see live, re-created dinosaurs in my lifetime, barring
    nuclear war or other such disaster.  There's just too much demand pull.
    
    		-John Bishop

    Re .26:
    
    Wells's "War of the Worlds" is still SF even though a thriving
    civilization of menacing Martians is now a good deal less likely than
    hyperspace or lab-cultured dinosaurs.  When it was written, it looked
    technically possible.  (In fact, the most *im*possible-looking elements
    -- the Martian technology -- have now mostly been achieved.  E.g. lasers
    in place of the Martian heat ray.)  Similarly, lab-cultured dinosaurs
    look technically, if only faintly, possible now.  At least as possible 
    as travel through hyperspace, anyway.
    
    Which *is* the fainter possibility, dino-clones or hyperspace? 
    Personally, I vote hyperspace.  Consider this:  Both possibilities may
    be slight, but if hyperspace exists and can be used for FTL travel, it
    would very likely *enable* the creation of dino-clones, even if these
    could be got in no other way.  Here's how: Special relativity is a very
    well-tested theory.  It is likely to survive in some form, even if
    physical theory expands to include hyperdrive.  Under that theory, FTL
    flight should also be usable for time-travel.  So, if all the dinosaur
    DNA in the amberized insects has already rotted, hyperdrive would allow
    one to return to a point in time when it *hadn't* already rotted (or, 
    of course, to an even earlier point in time when you could get your
    dinosaur DNA fresh, packaged in, say, convenient, ready-to-hatch eggs,
    but that's not cloning).
    
    	"["he"?  Isaac said this some time ago, but it grates a bit now.])"
    
    When the issue arose, Asimov showed himself to be a staunch feminist,
    so I wouldn't sweat the pronoun.  If you do, you will have to put up
    with a lot of grating from the politically incorrect language of the
    past.
    
    However, I think the quote comes from Clarke.  I think I first read it
    in a non-fiction work of his ("Profiles of the Future"?) ... in 
    reference to time-travel or hyperdrive, as it happens.  But maybe
    Clarke was quoting Asimov.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

Article: 5064
From: [email protected] (Ron Baalke)
Newsgroups: sci.geo.geology
Subject: BYU Houses Large Collection of Jurassic Fossils
Date: 9 Jun 1993 16:18 UT
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
 
From the Provo Daily Herald
June 6, 1993
 
BYU Home to North America's Largest "Jurassic Park"
 
      Steven Spielberg's dinosaur nightmare known as "Jurassic Park"
threatens to devour this summer's film box offices, but the real Jurassic
Park is housed under a stadium at Brigham Young University instead of
movie theaters worldwide.

      The 125-ton bone yard at BYU consumes much of the space beneath the
university's Cougar Stadium, which is crammed with the largest collection
of unprepared Jurassic era fossils found anywhere in North America.

      Its significance is not lost on other scientists. Dr. John S.
McIntosh of Wesleyan University wrote to BYU paleontologist Wade Miller
and said, "It (the BYU depository) is by far the foremost site on these
animals in the Western U.S. with one of the four or five largest
collections in the world."

      Seconding that opinion is Dr. Samuel Wells of the University of
California at Berkeley who said, "I have seen and studied all the great
collections of Jurassic and Cretaceous dinosaurs in North America and can
say that the BYU collection is one of the most valuable in existence."

      The biggest and heaviest bones are from the Ultrasaurus, a gigantic
plant-eater that BYU paleontologists found in a quarry in Southwestern
Colorado.  With a height topping 50-feet, such a dinosaur could lean over
the top of a football stadium to watch a football game--if its sheer
weight didn't collapse the steel girders that support the stands.

      The BYU collection, however, reflects a full range of Jurassic
dinosaur bones, an era approximately 136 to 205 million years ago.
According to Miller, who is also a geology professor and director of the
university's Earth Science Museum, some Jurassic dinosaurs were no bigger
than a medium-size dog, and some adult dinosaurs no larger than a chicken
have been found.

      Many of Miller's findings and much of his research reflect boyhood
fantasies of finding the unexpected.  Through his work at BYU, several
new species of dinosaurs have been identified.  Among other finds, cancer
has been located on pre-historic bones.  Some dinosaur bones analyzed
from BYU excavations are hollow, which would have made specific dinosaurs
more energy efficient, more lightweight and more mobile.  Rare skin
impressions from another dinosaur dig give new insights into the exterior
characteristics of dinosaurs, and an intact egg near an ancient lake bed
shows evidence of a tiny embryo.

      "These findings once would have been the conjuring of fertile
imaginations, but science is making so many discoveries that the science
fiction of yesterday is the reality of today," Miller says.  This is why
he stops just short of saying the DNA-induced world of "Jurassic Park"
is impossible.

      In the movie, based on Michael Crichton's best seller, catastrophe
strikes when genetically engineered live dinosaurs--the main attractions
of Jurassic Park zoo--go berserk.  "Most of the bones we collect have
very little DNA remaining, and the feat of masterminding pre-historic
animals in today's world appears to be excessively unlikely," Miller
says.  "But it is fun to speculate what would happen if men and dinosaurs
co-existed at the same time."

      Miller speculates that mankind with its intelligence would have
prevailed instead of dinosaurs. "Although many people no doubt would be
killed in such a world, size and ferocity aren't enough," he says.  "When
the book gives the velociraptor cunning and an evolving intelligence, I
simply don't believe it would be possible.  The brain case just doesn't
support it."

      He prefers to let his imagination consider how a Jurassic park would
be managed.  He wonders what kind of breeding would have to be done to
keep the numbers of dinosaurs low without making them extinct, and
suggests artificial insemination or some sort of cloning as an option.
He wonders what kind of barriers could be used, and how high and strong
a fence would have to be to contain the animals if they were housed
inland instead of an island.  He wonders what zookeepers would do for
food.

      "The cost of a Jurassic Park would be horrendously expensive, but
can you imagine how many people would pay great sums of money to see the
pre-historic past come to life?" he asks, adding that he would be among
the first in line.

      Although he says he admires the creativity of Crichton's book,
Miller has some quibbles with some quantum leaps in the story line. The
two dinosaur leaders, for example--Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex--do
not even come from the Jurassic era.

      But he anticipates the movie will heighten people's interest in
learning about dinosaurs.  And, except for the increased monetary value
people will attach to dinosaur remains, Miller believes the attention to
paleontology will be a side benefit from a piece of Hollywood celluloid.

     ___    _____     ___
    /_ /|  /____/ \  /_ /|     Ron Baalke         | [email protected]
    | | | |  __ \ /| | | |     Jet Propulsion Lab |
 ___| | | | |__) |/  | | |__   M/S 525-3684 Telos | The tuatara, a lizard-like
/___| | | |  ___/    | |/__ /| Pasadena, CA 91109 | reptile from New Zealand,
|_____|/  |_|/       |_____|/                     | has three eyes.
 

>                    <<< Note 1005.25 by CUPMK::WAJENBERG >>>
>
>    On the academic plane, the objections to cloning dinosaurs are as
>    irrelevant to SF as objections to hyperdrive coming from a physicist.

This was my initial thought, and since Earl beat me to posting it,
I declined to elaborate.
However, on reflection, I don't think the statement goes far enough
(and, apparently, neither does Earl, given his reply in .27).

The point is that we know *>in principle<* what it would take to clone
an organism, extinct or not, partial DNA or whole.
It's just a matter of engineering, and biotechnic engineering
is progressing at an incomprehensible (to me) rate.
On the other hand, we haven't a clue about how to get into hyperspace,
whatever (or even if) it is, (conjecture on "stable" wormholes 
and the like notwithstanding).

    
>    On the political side, I think the anti-science tone can be more than

I didn't read an "anti-science" tone in the book.
I read an anti-BUSINESS tone, based on Hammond's goals for the Park.

Is writing about the unexplained running amok necessarily anti-science?

- tom]

    Re .29:
    
    I haven't even read the book yet, so my remarks about its anti-science
    tone were based on the quotes of Crichton himself in .24:
    
    	Microbiologists view "Jurassic Park" as a veiled attack on science,
    	and Dr. Crichton himself acknowledges an anti-science undertone in
    	most of his novels, including "Jurassic Park".  "I'm surprised more
    	people haven't noticed it more than they have," he said in an
    	interview.  "I'm enthusiastic about science, but there is a growing
    	tendency toward scientism -- unthinking acceptance of scientific
    	ideas, and a tendency to discount ideas that science can't address." 
    
    This attitude of Crichton's ought to mesh perfectly with Spielberg's
    own attitudes, from what I can tell from movies like "Poltergeist" and
    "Close Encounters," and "E.T." where most grownups, business, the
    government, and conventional science are all part of a blundering, 
    wonder-squelching, hostile Establishment.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    I went and saw this movie last night.  As a nit-picker of SF movies, I
    could find only a couple of nits to pick.  Altogether a spell-binding
    movie and, without a doubt, we are looking at the new movie
    record-maker.
    
    A *must* see.

    Re .31:
    
    Thanks for the report.  How gory is it?  (This will affect my wife's
    willingness to see it.)  I mean, I assume some people get eaten by
    carnosaurs, but do we have to watch them chewing, for instance?
    
    Earl Wajenberg

Hi,

Went to the 9:45 showing at White City in Shrewsbury MA last night.  To answer
some of the easy questions:

<minor spoilers below about 20 blank lines>





















1.  Really fine flick, always something happening so that there's no time for
	a bio-break. Indiana Jones meets Dinosaurs (this is a compliment).

2.  Really intense flick.  This is *not* Barney the Dinosaur.  The PG-13 rating
	is earned.  Several "children in jeopardy" scenes that may scare young
	children who would identify with the kids on the screen.  My 14-year old
	loved it and had no problem with the intensity.

3.  There is very little gore (but not none).  No, we don't get to see any
	chewing of humans and only minor predatory scenes by big dinos against
	little dinos (little being relative).

4.  The effects are wonderful.  The dinos are marvelous creations and it is hard
	to believe that some of them are simply stop-action (others are
 	apparently full size models and other are computer animation,  I
	couldn't tell them apart)

5.  Story line is interesting, acting is fine, both are upstaged by the
	cinematography and effects and the intense pacing.

Call this "Spielberg recovers from 'Always'"

Chuck
	

None of the dinosaurs are stop-action.  Most are 100% computer generated....

    **SPOILERS**
    
    re: -.2 
    
    Only dinosaurs eating dinosaurs?  There are several scenes in which
    humans are savaged by dinosaurs.  The lawyer gets eaten by T. Rex. 
    This is the only one you actually get to see clearly.  The other three
    savagings occur either off-camera, or are hidden from view by
    foliage/fogged car windows.
    
    This movie is *not* for the weak-of-heart.  I read the book, knew what
    was coming, and still left several layers of skin in the theater (from
    jumping out of them).
    
    As far as the dinosaur special effects, most of the action was computer
    animation.  The only ones that were not were the sick triceratops, the
    baby velociraptor, the T. Tex when it attacks the cars, and the feet of
    the velociraptors when they were stalking the kids in the kitchen. 
    Everything else was computer generated, and very well done.

Spoilers:

.35    Only dinosaurs eating dinosaurs?  There are several scenes in which
.35    humans are savaged by dinosaurs.  The lawyer gets eaten by T. Rex. 
.35    This is the only one you actually get to see clearly.  The other three
.35    savagings occur either off-camera, or are hidden from view by
.35    foliage/fogged car windows.

I was trying not to be too specific about who gets it and who doesn't. But I
didn't mean to imply that no humans got eaten.  He asked:

.31    Thanks for the report.  How gory is it?  (This will affect my wife's
.31    willingness to see it.)  I mean, I assume some people get eaten by
.31    carnosaurs, but do we have to watch them chewing, for instance?

Yes, the lawyer gets it, no, we do not get to see chewing, ripping, and blood
dribbling down the chin of T-Rex.  Just a dainty snack plucked from the hors
d'oeuvre tray (not unlike the cop who gets it in the '50 classic "Beast from
20,000 Fathoms")

The remaining human munching is, as you noted, obscured and more scary for it.

Chuck

    
   Don't forget the discovery of the computer technician's arm.
                            Jeff Peters 

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke" 10-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	DNA Extracted from Jurassic Age Amber

Scientists isolate 'Jurassic Park' era DNA
June 10, 1993

	BERKELEY, Calif. (UPI) -- Scientists from two California universities
said Thursday they have isolated prehistoric genetic material, but
acknowledged that bringing dinosaurs back to life as in the new film
``Jurassic Park'' would be impossible today.

	George O. Poinar Jr., professor of entomology at the University of
California, Berkeley; molecular biologist Raul J. Cano, a professor at
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and Poinar's son, Hendrik, revealed their
discovery in this week's issue of ``Nature.''

	The breakthrough isolated 135-million-year-old genetic material, the
oldest to date. The same research team isolated DNA last year from a bee
that was entombed in amber 25 to 40 million years ago.

	The elder Poinar has been one of the leading researcher in
prehistoric insects since the 1970s. His work was used as a backdrop by
author Michael Crichton for his book ``Jurassic Park.''

	However, Poinar said cloning dinosaurs, the theme of the book and
movie based on the novel, would be nearly impossible. The movie opened
Thursday night nationwide.

	Poinar said using the most update methods of research would only
result in a ``small part'' of the total genetic code needed to
eventually clone a living creature.

	Poinar said he was excited about the latest breakthrough because it
proved that DNA from the dinosaur era ``perhaps even from the dinosaurs
themselves, could stay around long enough for us to find and sequence.''

	The research team began its hunt for dinosaur era DNA with a
worldwide search for a specimen.

	They found what they were looking for among fossils removed from a
dig near the towns of Jezzine and Dar al-Baidha in Lebanon. Among the
ancient rocks was a female weevil that lived 120-to-135 million years
ago perfectly preserved in amber.

	The specimen was tiny, only a mere tenth of an inch in length. But
the team was able to extract a small amount of DNA from the insect and
reconstruct two DNA chains.

	One chain was determined to be a gene for the protein 18s ribosomal
RNA, one of three major proteins that team up with RNA to make the
ribosome, a celluar machine that builds other proteins.

	The research team said their main goal in extracting the DNA was to
compare it to similar chains in living relatives of the weevil to see
what genetic mutations have taken place over the last 100 million years.

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date:    Fri, 11 Jun 1993 0:28:46 GMT+0000
% From: [email protected] (Ron Baalke)
% Subject: DNA Extracted from Jurassic Age Amber
% To: [email protected]

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke" 10-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Scientists Recover DNA from Time of Dinosaurs

From the Los Angeles Times
June 10, 1993

Scientists Recover DNA from Time of Dinosaurs
By Robert Lee Hotz

Genetics: Fragment is from an ancient weevil locked in amber.  But sorry,
'Jurassic Park' fans, extinction is forever.

     From an insect trapped in ancient amber, the scientists whose work
inspired "Jurassic Park" have extracted the oldest known fragments of DNA -
genetic material that was fresh when dinosaurs were alive and the world was
their buffet.

     Scientists from UC Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo recovered the
fossil DNA from an extinct weevil that jumped and skittered 120 million to
135 million years ago, making it about 80 million years older than any other
known sample.

     Their work, reported today in the scientific journal Nature, demonstrates
for the first time that the fragile molecular chains of DNA at the heart of
every living cell can survive such vast expanses of time.  The discovery is
the first genetic material that dates from the age of the dinosaurs.

     So far, researchers have teased ancient DNA from fossils as varied as
a 40-million-year-old bumble bee, which contained the previous oldest-known
DNA; a 17-million-year-old magnolia leaf; a 40,000-year-old wooly mammoth
calf, and even the 8,000-year-old soft tissues of a prehistoric human brain.
In each instance, the genes offer new insights into the pace of evolution and
the relationships among species.  And in work scheduled to be published
shortly, genes recovered from extinct plants have revealed clues to the
movements of drifting continents.

     But the newest finding takes scientists no closer to the science fiction
fantasy embodied by the book and film "Jurassic Park", in which ancient genes
could one day be used to resurrect an extinct animal as a Tyrannosaurus Rex
or a remote human ancestor like Neanderthal man.

     Extinction, the scientists acknowledged, is still forever.

     But scientists do not need a living dinosaur to satisfy their research
ambitions.  Even a single legible dinosaur gene would be more than enough
to make them happy.  The current discovery makes some believe that the goal
is well within a scientist's grasp.

     "This does show you how long DNA can survive and it also gives you
supporting information showing it may be possible to get dinosaur DNA",
said Raul J. Cano, molecular biologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.  "We
are within the realm of opportunity."

     Cano performed the analysis with Berkeley entomologist George O. Poinar
Jr., who was among those who first proposed more than a decade ago that
dinosaur DNA might be recovered from blood preserved inside biting insects
trapped in ancient amber.  From that theory, author Michael Crichton drew
the plot for the best-selling 1990 novel.  Hendrik Poinar, George's son and
a graduate student in Cano's laboratory, also worked on the project.

     Unlike most dinosaur fossils seen in museums, in which bone has
long since been replaced by minerals, amber can preserve the actual
tissue of an organism, even the contents of its stomach.  Because
every cell contains the complete genetic blueprint of the plant or
animal to which it belongs, a well-preserved cell could yield, in
theory, an intact set of genes. 

     The fossil weevil, barely the size of a pinhead, yielded about one
millionth of the insect's entire genetic blueprint, Cano said, not even
enough DNA to make up a single gene of the hundreds or thousands of
organism may have required.

     But it was enough to allow the researchers to conclude that "the
majority of animal remains in amber have preserved DNA that can be
extracted and studied, thus making amber a treasure chest for molecular
paleontologists."

     Hendrik Poinar and Cano say they are attempting to recover genes from
what they suspect may be blood swallowed by midges preserved in a piece
75-million-year-old amber - well within the time that dinosaurs dominated
the planet.

     Cano admits that even if they are successful he will have a hard time
convincing skeptical colleagues that he has indeed discovered the molecular
raw material of an earth-shaking 90-ton Brachiosaurus or a horned Triceratops.

     The researchers acknowledge that they do not know what the genes of a
dinosaur might look like.  They will have to identify the genetic material
by a process of elimination and a leap of faith.

     A computer database helps them compare the ancient DNA to all known
genetic sequences of organims living today.  If a suspected dinosaure gene
does not match the sequence of any other animal or plant on the computer, they
can attempt to narrow the search by looking for a family resemblance among the
genes of what scientists believe are the living descendants of dinosaurs -
birds and reptiles.  From there, the researchers will have to rely on
educated guesswork and peer review.

     "How to recognize dinosaur DNA is a real tough question," Cano said.
"This is out stumbling block.  We can tell bacteria DNA from insect DNA.
We can tell the difference between insects and vertebrates.  If our work is
correct and we get something that might be a dinosaur, we will have to come
up with some kind of consensus concerning what we are looking at."

     "It is going to be a tedious Job," he said.

     Some scientists caution that any claims concerning antique DNA should
be treated cautiously.  Tomas Lindahl, a researcher at the Imperial Cancer
Research Fund's Clare Hall Laboratories in England, warned last month in
the same scientific journal that published today's report that "much better
experimental documentation is required before such claims can be seriously
considered."

     He argues that genetic material - a long twisted strand of molecules
that contains all the basic information of heredity - is so chemically
unstable that even the best-preserved fossil DNA would decompose after
a few million years.  And the process scientists use to amplify the molecules
of fossil DNA is itself so sensitive that it can deceive a researcher into
believing he is looking at the stuff of an extinct species when he has
only succeeded in amplifying a molecule of something from under his
fingernails.

     Russell Higuchi, a research investigator at Roche Molecular Systems in
Emeryville who helped recover genetic material from the 40,000-year-old body
of a wooly mammoth, said, "The problem with the amplification process is that
you can take any single molecule and get something.  There could be
contamination from modern DNA."

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date:    Fri, 11 Jun 1993 3:38:05 GMT+0000
% From: [email protected] (Ron Baalke)
% Subject: Scientists Recover DNA from Time of Dinosaurs
% To: [email protected]

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke" 10-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Jurassic Park Opens Amid High Expectations

'Jurassic Park' opens amid high expectations
June 10, 1993

	LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- The dinosaurs from ``Jurassic Park'' arrived
Thursday in U.S. theaters amid a ``want-to-see'' frenzy that has not
been evident for a movie since ``Batman'' opened four years ago.

	The Universal release, due for its first screenings at about 1,500
theaters in late-night Thursday showings, has been seen as likely to
pull in as much as $50 million in its opening weekend.

	Universal said advance ticket sales have reached record levels
nationwide, prompting many theaters to set additional screenings on the
opening weekend. On Friday, the number of screens is expected to double
to about 3,000.

	Analysts estimate the studio, a unit of Matsushita Electric
Industrial Co., has spent $18 million in pre-opening advertising, in
addition to numerous marketing tie-ins and a renewed popularity in
Michael Crichton's novel ``Jurassic Park.''

	``Batman'' opened with a surprise $42.7 million first weekend in 1989
and word-of-mouth on the movie elevated it into the megahit category as
it grossed more than a quarter billion dollars domestically.

	That record was broken last summer when ``Batman Returns'' took in
$47 million in its first weekend and $100 million in its first dozen
days. But the sequel then fell off sharply as word got out that it was
not as good as the original, and it wound up with a gross of slightly
more than $160 million.

	``Jurassic Park,'' directed by Steven Spielberg, is coming into a
market that has several movies performing respectably, led by TriStar's
``Cliffhanger,'' but no clear competition for its first week.

	That will change on June 18 when Columbia opens its rival
blockbuster, ``Last Action Hero,'' starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

	Universal first planned to open ``Jurassic Park'' on June 25, but
then leapfrogged it over ``Hero'' several months ago and moved it up two
weeks.

	Initial reviews of the two movies have favored ``Jurassic Park,''
with Daily Variety predicting it will be a ``monster'' hit.

	Spielberg had reportedly toned down some of the book's more violent
scenes, but some observers believe parents may be reluctant to let small
children see the movie. Still, others think children will demand to see
it because of the general popularity of dinosaurs.

	The film, starring Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Richard
Attenborough, carries a reported price tag of $75 million to $100
million. In Crichton's story, dinosaurs that have been genetically re-
created break out of their theme park park after the safety system fails.

	Universal has not had a big hit since Matshushita bought Universal's
parent MCA Inc. for $6.6 billion in early 1991.

	Matsushita executives at headquarters in Osaka, Japan, have said they
do not want to interfere to a significant degree with Universal, but
rumors persist that if ``Jurassic Park'' is not a major hit, with
domestic grosses topping $200 million, longtime studio chief Tom Pollock
will lose his job.

	The film will need to make $221 million to make the all-time top 10
list, which ends at $220.9 million with ``Ghostbusters.''

	The 15 top-grossing movies, year of release, total gross:

	1. ``E.T. -- The Extraterrestrial,'' 1982, $399.8 million.
	2. ``Star Wars,'' 1977, $322 million.
	3. ``Home Alone,'' 1990, $281.6 million.
	4. ``Return of the Jedi,'' 1983, $263 million.
	5. ``Jaws,'' 1975, $260 million.
	6. ``Batman,'' 1989, $251.2 million.
	7. ``Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' 1981, $242.4 million.
	8. ``Beverly Hills Cop,'' 1984, $234.8 million.
	9. ``The Empire Strikes Back,'' 1980, $223 million.
	10. ``Ghostbusters,'' 1984, $220.9 million.
	11. ``Ghost,'' 1990, $217 million.
	12. ``Back to the Future,'' 1985, $208.2 million.
	13. ``Aladdin,'' 1992, $205.2 million.
	14. ``Terminator 2: Judgment Day,'' 1991, $204 million.
	15. ``Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,'' 1987, $197.2 million.

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date:    Fri, 11 Jun 1993 0:29:55 GMT+0000
% From: [email protected] (Ron Baalke)
% Subject: Jurassic Park Opens Amid High Expectations
% To: [email protected]

Well , I just got back from seeing the movie and I loved it. I haven't read the
book yet (didn't want to spoil the movie) but now I will. I'm one who is not
fond of lots of gruesome scenes and I don't think this was too bad at all. Kids
may still get nightmares but this was easier to take than Terminator II. I was
still jumping out of my seat once or twice though. There were a few pretty funny
lines scattered here and there that helped give a bit of comic relief. liesl

    I thought it was great.  Hit all the important points from the
    book, and did it well.

    It seems to be popular to moan about the lack of "character
    development".  I thought the dino characters were developed quite
    well.  The humans weren't bad either.
    
    One of the things that those who read it will enjoy is
    the visual accuracy -- many of the scenes come out exactly as
    portrayed in the book!

Saw it today -

for those with kids, I took my 9 year old and his friend (plus my husband).
There were two scenes where my 9 year old wanted to leave - both when the kids
in the movie were being terrorized.  His friend, and other similarly aged kids
around us were gripping their seats, but didn't want to leave.  After the
movie was over, my kid wanted to go back in the line and see it again, inspite
of the two scenes!

This was a great sci-fi/fantasy/suspense/horror movie!  Even my husband and I
jumped or gripped the seat several times!  We argued over the sci-fi vs fantasy
aspect of it, but the suspense was better than Hitchcock.  In my opinion, the
nits (plot, character development) are negated by the fantastic blend of
special effects, suspense, and overall pace of the movie. I want to see it
again to catch some of the details I know I missed because I was holding my
breath.

BTW, we saw this in a theater that advertised the new digital sound system. I
actually heard the rain in in front/behind me and felt/heard the dino come from
the rear and pass over us to the screen.  This definitely added to the
suspense/horror aspect of the film and made us "feel" as if we were there.

This is a must see!!

Alice

    The movie was good, but it was even simpler than the book, which was
    already simplistic.  There just wasn't any depth to the problems on the
    island; it was just things-go-wrong, characters-deal-with-it.  Some
    specific differences between the book and the movie (spoilers):
    
    Significant portions of Grant's ordeal with the kids are excised:  the
    trip down the river, through the aviary, et cetera.
    
    There's no progressive deterioration of the park; the hacker shuts
    things off and that's it.
    
    The scene where the raptors clearly decoy the two people outside so
    others can get behind them is missing.
    
    There's no discovery of the underground nest.  There's no involvement
    of dinosaurs on the boat or mainland.
    
    Power is restored in the movie without subsequent problems of running
    off batteries.  They never figure out how to undo the hacker's command
    except by shutting down the system.
    
    The romance between the two paleontologists is played up a bit (but
    only a bit), and there's an added sub-theme about him not liking kids
    but learning to during the movie.
    
    For the second time (Sneakers was first), a mathematician is portrayed
    a sort of ultra-hip character.
    
    There are several misplaced Spielberg touches.  For example, the truck
    falls out of the tree and _just_ manages to land squarely over Grant
    and the boy, not harming them -- in the same manner that things manage
    to happen just right in the Indiana Jones movies.  That's fun in an
    Indiana Jones movie, but it detracts from the credibility of a more
    serious story.
    
    
    				-- edp

>                      <<< Note 1005.41 by QUIVER::ANIL >>>
>
>    I thought it was great.  Hit all the important points from the
>    book, and did it well.

It didn't come CLOSE to hitting all the important points from the book!
(But movies can't do that - a 40 page short story or novelette (10% of JP)
is the longest form of story that can fit into a two hour movie without
major cutting.)

But that said, the most serious problem I saw with the movie was that it
tried to include TOO much from the book.
The movie was SO fast-paced, to try to fit in all the incidents that it could,
that there was no time for contemplation on the part of audience or characters.
The scene with the triceratops was a total waste of time in plot or character
development, just a gratuitous excuse for big puppetry.
In the book, this matter moved the major plot line of unpredictability
of ecological activity.

(You know, it could have been a whole lot better movie if it hadn't 
been for all those dinosaurs taking up screen time, a la the Enterprise
in ST: TMP.)

I recommend reading the book before seeing the movie so you'll be briefed
on what's happening and why.

Yes, the movie was simplistic, but I disagree that the book was simplistic.

I am somewhat pleased to report that my curmudgeonly fears about it
being a kid-centered movie were not applicable - this time.

- tom]

<    The movie was good, but it was even simpler than the book, which was
<    already simplistic.  There just wasn't any depth to the problems on the
<    island; it was just things-go-wrong, characters-deal-with-it. 

  
This is pretty much what Roger Ebert had to say. I suppose it depends on what
you thought the movie was trying to accomplish. It wasn't my impression that
this was meant to be a probing analysis of the meaning of science and nature.
Those were just sidelights. This was meant to be a fun/scary summer blockbuster.
And, just maybe, it planted a seed of doubt about whether we should do all that
we could do with science. liesl

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "John Matrow" 13-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	JURASSIC PARK: Different *cast* in movie

BOOK:

 Total Animals               238
 -------------------------------------------
      Species         Expected  Found    Ver
 -------------------------------------------
 Tyrannosaurs		  2	  2	4.1
 Maiasaurs		 21	 21	3.3	duck-bill w/crest
 Stegosaurs		  4	  4	3.9
 Triceratops		  8	  8	3.1
 Procompsognathids	 49	 49	3.9	small, curved teeth
 Othnielia		 16	 16	3.1	turkey size, large eyes
 Velociraptors		  8	  8	3.0	fast sickle-foot
 Apatosaurs		 17	 17	3.1
 Hadrosaurs		 11	 11	3.1	duck-bill
 Dilophosaurs		  7	  7	4.3	20', 2 crests, fast
 Pterosaurs		  6	  6	4.3
 Hysilophodontids	 33	 33	2.9	5', head carried low
 Euoplocephalids	 16	 16	4.0	ankylosur, horny beak
 Styracosaurs		 18	 18	3.9	ceratops with shield horns
 Microceratops		 22	 22	4.1	slender, fast
 -------------------------------------------
 Total			238	238


MOVIE:

 Brachiosaurus                                  "arm lizard"
 Gallimimus                                     "bird mimic"
 Triceratops                                    "three-horned face"
 Parasaurolophus                                "beside Saurolophus"
 Proceratosaurus                                "before Ceratosaurus"
 Metriacanthosaurus                             "moderately spined lizard"
 Segisaurus                                     "Segi Canyon lizard"
 Tyrannosaurus Rex                              "tyrant lizard"
 Velociraptor                                   "fast plunderer"
 Dilophosaurus                                  "two ridged lizard"
 Herrerasaurus                                  "Herrera lizard"
 Baryonyx                                       "heavy claw"

-- 
John Matrow   Product Solutions, NCR Peripheral Products Division
 316-636-8851 <[email protected]>
 FAX:636-8889 "Call 316-636-8628 to have array info faxed to you"
 NCR:654-8851 "Call 303-499-7111 for a good time"

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Subject: JURASSIC PARK: Different *cast* in movie
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Fri, 11 Jun 93 8:37:07 CDT
% From: John Matrow <[email protected]>

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "John Matrow" 14-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Re: JURRASIC PARK: Different *cast* in movie

MOVIE:

 Brachiosaurus        Seen/identified           "arm lizard"
 Gallimimus           Seen/identified           "bird mimic"
 Triceratops          Seen/identified           "three-horned face"
 Parasaurolophus      Seen                      "beside Saurolophus"
 Proceratosaurus                                "before Ceratosaurus"
 Metriacanthosaurus                             "moderately spined lizard"
 Segisaurus                                     "Segi Canyon lizard"
 Tyrannosaurus Rex    Seen/identified           "tyrant lizard"
 Velociraptor         Seen/identified           "fast plunderer"
 Dilophosaurus        Seen/identified           "two ridged lizard"
 Herrerasaurus                                  "Herrera lizard"
 Baryonyx                                       "heavy claw"

This list is actually from the studio-authorized magazine JURASSIC PARK.

So why did they change 8 from the book when they only used 3 of them?
Must be artistic license.

-- 
John Matrow   Product Solutions, NCR Peripheral Products Division
 316-636-8851 <[email protected]>
 FAX:636-8889 "Call 316-636-8628 to have array info faxed to you"
 NCR:654-8851 "Call 303-499-7111 for a good time"

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Subject: Re: JURRASIC PARK: Different *cast* in movie
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Mon, 14 Jun 93 8:52:46 CDT
% From: John Matrow <[email protected]>

re: -.1

  I'm going to assume you mean Jurassic Park.
  Good reviews only help if you know what movie is being discussed. :-)

Shane

    re .43:

    From my (slightly faded) memory of the book, it seemed to
    track the rememberable events OK.

> I recommend reading the book before seeing the movie so you'll be briefed
> on what's happening and why.

    Agree here.. by the way, it's been the top-selling paperback
    fiction for a few weeks now.

Well, I saw it sunday and loved it. They dropped a bunch of stuff 
from the book to fit it into the 2 hour format but they still 
seemed to handle things reasonably consistantly. What is nice about 
the movie is that it leaves enough of the book alone that you can 
read the book afterwards and still enjoy it.

    	If I am going to pay almost seven dollars for a film these days,
    I think it is only reasonable to expect that said film goes out of
    its way to entertain me and show that it needs to be seen on the big
    screen and not via videotape.  
    
        JP did this and more.  It is not a perfect film, but perfection of 
    plot and characters is not why you should go see it.  The film makers 
    did a decent enough job making things work, but the special effects 
    will be the standard which other films will be put against for years 
    to come.
    
    	Some scientific good may also come out of it:  More people 
    interested in the study of prehistoric life.
    
    	Larry
    

It's a kids film 8^)

Jeffrey Dahmer plays Barney!

�    I think it is only reasonable to expect that said film goes out of
�    its way to entertain me and show that it needs to be seen on the big
�    screen and not via videotape. 

I agree, but I still need to get a subwoofer for my stereo system before JP
comes out on video.  You know, something that'll make water in a glass
vibrate!  Any guesses as to when JP will come out on videotape?  My guess is
before Christmas.

In spite of theories to the contrary (you know, like T-Rex being a scavenger.
I mean, really, how could he maintain a size like that eating carrion?) the
T-Rex was exactly as I have imagined she would be.

.
-Patrick

>>how could he maintain a size like that eating carrion?

By creating it, of course 8^)

    	T-Rex did both scavenging and hunting, according to the latest
    theories.  What does a T-Rex eat (say it with me)?  Anything he/she
    wants! :^)
                 
    	As for JP being for kids, does this mean adults can't enjoy it? :^)
    Seriously, why are dinosaurs so marketed for kids?  It's adults who
    dig up their bones and do the research.  It's a shame that in our
    culture wonder is left behind after childhood for most adults.  God
    forbid anyone think I'm saying that kids can't enjoy the prehistoric
    beasts as well.  I just think it's time adults got their priorities
    straight. :^)
    
    	Larry
    

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "John Matrow" 15-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	"Here Come the DNAsaurs" NEWSWEEK 6/14/93

Excerpts from "Here Come the DNAsaurs" by Sharon Begley, NEWSWEEK 6/14/93

... last September ... biologists Raul Cano of Calif. Poly. St. Univ. at
San Luis Obispo and George Poinar Jr. of Univ. of Calif., Berkeley,
announced that they had cloned DNA from a 40 million-year-old bee
preserved in amber. Almost simultaneously, scientists at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York reported that they had cloned
the DNA from a 25 million-year-old termite trapped in the golden mineral.
...
In 1982 Poinar and his wife, Roberta Hess, discovered that amber did not
contain merely the imprint of insects, nor even their dried-out remains.
"The body of the organism itself was inside the amber," he says. ... But
when Poinar and colleagues set out to extract DNA ... "granting agencies
refused to fund us," says Poinar. "The project was considered too avant-garde."

Devoting weekends, evenings and their own money to the spurned project, 
Poinar and like-minded enthusiasts formed the Extinct DNA Study Group. In
1984, researchers led by Berkeley's Allan Wilson succeeded spectacularly
in extracting DNA from the preserved skin of a quagga, a zebralike beast
native to Africa that was hunted into extinction in the 1880s. [Many
other DNA extractions took place since]
...
They haven't cloned any beings and brought Tut back to the Nile. ...
Charles Pellegrino, a paleobotanist and rocket designer who lives on
the fringes of science and evinces no desire to move toward the center,
popularized this scenario in 1985, in Omni magazine.

... a few years after Pellgrino's musing, Poinar's son Hendrik, working with
Cano, figured out how to go beyond merely cracking the amber and extracting
the DNA. He managed to rehydrate it, like so much instant mashed potatoes,
returning to the wizened strands their ability to replicate. As a result,
scientists can now "turn on" the ancient DNA and make billions of copies
through a revolutionary process called polymerase chaing reaction-
biology's Xerox machine....

But they did not have the complete set of instructions ...

Except that in 1992 Cano began using a powerful Sun Microsystems workstation
to call up on his computer screen strands of ancient DNA, align them with
DNA fragments from such relatives as living birds and reptiles, infer the
similarities and differences-and, perhaps, figure out what is missing.

Having perfected the art of extracting DNA from amber-encased insects,
Cano is using the same technology to fish for DNA directly from the
fossils of duckbill dinosaurs. He calls it "molecular paleontology."
Also on the trail of dino DNA from fossil bones to paleontologist Jack
Horner.... "Getting DNA out of a dinosaur [bone] is real easy," he
says. "But proving it's not [DNA from] bacteria or fungus contaminating
the bones has never been done."
...
None of the ancient DNA harvested from amber or fossils, notes the 
Natural History Museum's Ward Wheeler, is longer than 250 of the units
(called base pairs) used to measure DNA. The human genome contains 3
billion base pairs. Dinosaurs might have had between 1 billion and 10
billions, estimates the museum's Rob Desalle, who with Wheeler helped
isolate the 25 million-year-old termite DNA. Even if scientists 
discover every single one of the base pair chains, joining 40 million
of them in the right order would be like taping together a book that
has been chopped into individual letters. "And even if we could splice
them all together," says Desalle, "there are all sorts of development
things that happen in the egg that we don't know about."
...
You need a lot more than DNA to build a dinosaur, says David Botstein,
chairman of the genetics department at Stanford Univ.. You need a cell.
Only in the cell, with it still-not-understood biological signals that
tell genes to turn off and on, can DNA direct the creation of an embryo.
...
The challenge to cloning a dinosaur, assuming that one had a cell
full of DNA, is that cells from anything but an embryo seem to have
forgotton how to make a complete animal.
...
-- 
John Matrow   Product Solutions, NCR Peripheral Products Division
 316-636-8851 <[email protected]>
 FAX:636-8889 "Call 316-636-8628 to have array info faxed to you"
 NCR:654-8851 "Call 303-499-7111 for a good time"

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Subject: "Here Come the DNAsaurs" NEWSWEEK 6/14/93
% To: [email protected]
% Date: Tue, 15 Jun 93 13:06:22 CDT
% From: John Matrow <[email protected]>

    	Here's an SF thought based on the special effects in JP:  If they
    can make computer animated dinosaurs appear so real, how long before
    they do the same for actors and actresses so that producers won't have 
    to pay them or put up with their egos?
    
    	Larry
    

Ma-ma-ma-moo-ooove over Max Headroom (and the movie Looker as well)

    Imaginary actors will probably proliferate once two barriers are
    overcome:
    
    1)  The technical barrier of doing people right.  "Jurassic Park" makes 
    	clear this barrier could go down soon, but (a) dinosaurs don't
    	have very expressive faces, which saves work for the animator,
    	and (b) we are much more expert at viewing, and so more critical
    	of, human images than we are of animal images.
    
    2)	The economic barrier of doing FX cheaper than hiring people.
    	(Actually, an FX "actor" might represent several invisible human
    	actors -- a voice, plus one or more to do a lot of the moving
    	as a ready method of guiding the actions of the image.)
    
    And, man, oh, man, if Hollywood tempts us into impossible standards of
    human appearance *now,* imagine the standards when the "actors" are not
    limited by fleshware constraints.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    Re .58, and "imaginary" standards of beauty: Ah, but if the technology
    advances far enough, I could conceive of holographic-image projectors
    tailored to be worn as "costumes". One could program them to project
    whatever image one wanted - one's own appearance slightly enhanced, or
    someone/something completely different. [Could even be used to project
    clothing, so one could run around in whatever's most comfortable while
    still looking as if one were wearing corporate drag or the correct
    McDonald's uniform or whatever.] Lots of science fiction stories
    dealing with this sort of thing, many of them perhaps derived from the
    old tales of hags who turn out to be beautiful princesses, or frogs who
    turn out to be princes - though in this case it'd be the princes and
    princesses turning out to be frogs, if the batteries give out. ;-)
    
    -b

    re .-*; wasn't this idea explored in Brunner's classic "Stand On
    Zanzibar"?  If I recall correctly, you could subscribe to a service
    that would map you into the commercials (and maybe movies as well?).
    The more expensive the service the better the mapping.  E.g., the
    cheapest service provided a generic figure about the right height and
    build, but always seen mostly from the back.  The most expensive service
    was *you*, seen from the front.
    
    len.
     

RE: .57 (et al)

This was shown explicitly in the movie "The Running Man".  Remember the
scene right near the end where the game show needed to have their hero
defeat Arnold S.?  They put 2 people into a cage with the Hunter, mapped
images of Arnold and the girl onto the two people, who then got killed
by the Hunter.  When the scene was over you saw the overlay being removed,
and the face/body of the original victim revealed.

-- Ken Moreau

Just receivd this em that I thought was appropriate:


Copied without permission.
====================================================================
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 93 15:29:59 +1000
From: gidday::gidday::lawler (Dennis Lawler VIA CSC Sydney Australia  18-Jun-1993 1529)
To: @tsc.dis
Cc: LAWLER
Subject: Problematic Park

Jarrasic Park is a great book but have you read Problematic Park by 
C.S.C.Sydney.

It traces the story of some engineers who have been able to clone bugchecks 
dating from as early as the first Fieldtestic period. These previously extinct 
creatures are created by extracting traces of DSRI strands from bugs frozen in 
long forgotton CMS libraries. The CMSLIBs have preserved possibly 100's if not 
1000's of these microorganisms. These often incomplete samples are then merged 
with a healthy current source to create a new variant which we commonly call a 
MUP (Merged & Updated Palliative).
8-)

Don't let the Velociraptors bite!

Cheers,
Dennis.


===========================================================================

	Jeff.

    I was musing over what this wondrous computer-animation technology will
    be used for next, and got to thinking - with this, we could have
    dragons! Unicorns that are ethereal and strange, not just horses with
    horns! Centaurs, sphinxes, Medusa... And skeletons! (Always hard to do
    with makeup because real bones are _smaller_ than people, so pasting
    stuff on top of a person to make 'em look like bones never quite works.
    (Admittedly, the skeletons in "Jason and the Argonauts" were wonderful
    examples of stop-motion, but I should think that computer animation
    could do even better.)) Zombies, half-dead things, undead things,
    Things That Man Was Not Meant to See, Lovecraftian things...
    
    And why stop there? Aliens! I wonder what sort of a film could be made
    based on "Titan"... How about the Sheem robots from "Witches of
    Karres"? All sorts of aliens that are the wrong size and shape to make
    from people-in-suits, but that are too complex or subtle to be easily
    simulated via classic stop-motion or remote-control models...
    
    Sigh!
    
    -b

>    	Here's an SF thought based on the special effects in JP:  If they
>    can make computer animated dinosaurs appear so real, how long before
>    they do the same for actors and actresses so that producers won't have 
>    to pay them or put up with their egos?

Well, now that the movie is out and has been seen, I'm curious as to what
technologies WERE used to create the dinos.
It's clearly (to my relatively experienced computer graphics eye)
not the same image synthesis stuff I've been seeing for even 
the past few years.
The credits at the end of the movie gave me little guidance, except
to indicate that there was far more puppetry than I had been expecting.
(Extraordinary puppetry, but mechanical as opposed to optical creation.)

Anybody got the scoop, perhaps by dino and scene?
The small scale puppetry is fairly obvious:  the triceratops, the diloph---
(the spitter), the huge brachiosaurs.
What about the roving velociraptors and the T. Rex?
How about the flocking gall---?  (you can tell I didn't catch all the names)

- tom]

    according to an artical I read. There was very little pupetry they
    mostly used it to move real objects that the animation was suppose to
    move simular to Roger Rabit.
                       Jeff Peters

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke" 17-JUN-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	One Million Dollars Donated to Fort Hays State University

WICHITA EAGLE, Sunday, June 13

"Breathing life into fossils" by Mike Berry

   Fort Hays State University took a giant dinosaur-sized step toward
relocating its famous Sternberg fossil museum in a dome-shaped building
filled with life-sized robotic dinosaurs Saturday night.

   At a special viewing of the movie "Jurassic Park," the university
president, Ed Hammond, announced that a Hays couple had donated $1
million toward the museum project. He described the donors, Ross and 
Marianna Beech, as "two of the greatest friends that Fort Hays State
University ever had."

   The Beeches, longtime supportes of the school, make their fortune in
oil, ranching, and banking.

   Hammond said that the donation from the Beech family brings a $7
million fund-raising drive to within $1.2 million of its goal and that
the new museum, just off I-70, could begin attracting more that a
quarter of a million visitors a year by the summer of 1995. Renovation
of the building is to begin by the end of this year. 

   It was only natural to tie in the Sternberg announcement with the
opening of the Steven Speilberg movie about dinosaurs, Hammond said.
"In fact," he said jokingly, "the doctor [sic] in the movie who puts
the genetic material together to recreate the dinosaurs is named
Hammond ... but he's a little flaky."

   Plans call for the Sternberg collection of 3.75 million artifacts
to be relocated from the present cramped, on-campus location to a $4.5
million dome-shaped building sold to Fort Hays State for a dollar by
Chryler Corp.'s finance arm. 

   The move will allow more exhibits to be put on display and will
increase the museum's visibility at both the national and international
levels, said Jerry Choate, curator of museums.  The Sternberg Museum
already can claim the third-largest collection of flying reptiles in
the world but is probably best known for a fish-within-a-fish fossil
that shows one huge prehistoric fish preserved forever in the gullet
of an even large fish. [6' Gillicus within 14' Xiphactinus]

   Those displays will have to share billing with the new animated
robotic dinosaurs planned for the Sternberg's "walk though time"
exhibit, an infinitely safer experience than that depicted in "Jurassic
Park," in which the dinosaurs sometimes devour visitors. Life-size
re-creations of huge dinosaurs will appear in natural settings, roaring
and moving as visitors pass by.

   Parts of the new museum will have to be constructed around the
enormous mechanical skeletons of the robotic dinosaurs, and designers
aren't sure how many of the computer-controlled creatures will prowl
the halls. Hammond said at least a half-dozen dinosaurs will open the
feature.

   [Hays, Kansas, is located on I-70 about halfway between Denver
and Kansas City.]
-- 
% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date:    Thu, 17 Jun 1993 21:48:44 GMT+0000
% From: [email protected] (Ron Baalke)
% Subject: One Million Dollars Donated to Fort Hays State University
% To: [email protected]

    Re .63:
    
    A few years ago, some folk in Britain made movie versions of the first
    four Chronicles of Narnia.  These included a couple of centaurs, but
    they wre nowhere near Jurassic Park quality;  they were done by filming
    a man and a horse and matting the top half of one over the head of the
    other; they tended to come apart at the seam.
    
    Yes, I too drool at the thought of what they could do now, if only
    budgetary constraints allowed.  My favorite candidate would be the
    Sector General stories of James White, about a space station hospital
    with a staff of 60+ different species and patients of even grater
    variety.  The "regulars" in the series include about six humans, the
    insectile Dr. Prilicla, the elephantine Chief Diagnostician Thornastor
    (who is a terrible gossip, having three mouths and unable to keep any of
    them shut, as one of the human characters observed),  and Charge Nurse
    Naydrad, who looks like a twleve-foot-long caterpillar with silver fur.
    
    Another good candidate would be the Polesotechnic League stories of
    Poul Anderson, where major characters include Adzel, a giant draconian
    centauroid, and minor characters come in an endless array of species.
    
    The Lensman series, too, now that I think of it, and Niven, and...
    
    Earl Wajenberg

>    Here's an SF thought based on the special effects in JP:  If they
>    can make computer animated dinosaurs appear so real, how long before
>    they do the same for actors and actresses so that producers won't have 
>    to pay them or put up with their egos?
    
    Who does the voices?  Back to real people, real egos.
    
    BTW, we're already there -- the best example in the last year is
    "Alladin."

    I saw the movie last week, then re-read the book. 
    
    The movie did a very good job of streamlining the book, using
    the usual tricks: compressing and blending characters, dropping
    exposition and minor sub-plots, and losing "non-essential" episodes.
    
    The body count was much higher in the book.  And there was one scene
    from the book I wish they had included (although I didn't miss it
    as I watched the movie) -- the aviary.
    
    I thought the special effects were spectacular.  The plot and
    characterization were on par with the book (they were 2D in the
    book, too).  

�    	Here's an SF thought based on the special effects in JP:  If they
�    can make computer animated dinosaurs appear so real, how long before
�    they do the same for actors and actresses so that producers won't have 
�    to pay them or put up with their egos?
    
    I'd imagine they'd still have to pay for rights to reproduce their
    images.

    	Hollywood could create their own actors - and voices eventually.
    
        Larry
    

    Re .71:
    
    I do not doubt that, given enough time, you could drop all actors out
    of the process.  That would still leave the people who compose the
    image, its voice, its actions, and the story it moves through (probably
    along with most or all of the scenery it moves through).  In short, it
    would leave all the people you see listed on the credits of a cartoon,
    minus the "voice talents," and with the names of the jobs probably
    changed.
    
    This still leaves the problems of pay and ego.  However, I grant you
    that it changes the picture, since behind-the-scenes people are less
    individually indispensible than on-screen people, and now they are all
    behind the scenes.
    
    But push the tools a little further.  Suppose a single artist can
    develop a character-package, an integrated image/voice/action program
    that you can plug into a script.  Then they can copyright that program
    and the artist + program is very similar to an actor, only more
    deliberately crafted.  (Not necessarily *much* more, given meticulous
    acting lessons and plastic surgery.)
    
    Or suppose a single artist can generate an entire movie, given the
    right animation tools.  A movie then becomes as individual a product as
    a novel, and Hollywood could find itself in much the same position as
    network television.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

>                      -< As long as we're speculating... >-
>
>    Re .71:
>    
>    I do not doubt that, given enough time, you could drop all actors out
>    of the process.  That would still leave the people who compose the
>    image, its voice, its actions, and the story it moves through...

Well, a recent Analog story (April? May? June? 1993) took it step further.
An AI responsible for creating characterizations and following a plot....

Well, more would involve a spoiler.....

- tom]

    Not-so-recently, Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
    featured a politically active AI that presented itself to the public as
    a charismatic leader of the rebellion -- seen only on television, but
    then that's where we're used to seeing VIPs.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    "The Darfstellar" by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
    
    							Ann B.

    Re .75:
    
    Counter-example?  You mean about synthetic actors not working, or what?
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    `They' had found a way to record the talents of most actors, so
    they would load a tape into a robot, and it would play a role in
    the style of Whomever.  Whomever got a royalty.  Everybody loved the
    acting robots, and referred them.  The protagonist was an actor who
    internalized his roles, and so he could not be recorded.  He couldn't
    get work, but he still loved acting....
    
    						Ann B.

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Ron Baalke"  8-JUL-1993 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Dinosaur Blood Found?

IS DINOSAUR DNA MORE THAN STUFF OF MOVIES?
By Malcolm W. Brown
New York Times News Service
July 1, 1993

   A  Montana paleontologist and his colleagues think  they  have 
found   red  blood  cells  in  the  fossilized  leg  bone  of   a 
Tyrannosaurus rex and say they have high hopes of extracting  DNA 
from the dinosaur's cells.

   The discovery of the putative dinosaur blood cells has not yet 
been submitted to a scientific journal or independently confirmed 
but   was  reported  two  weeks  ago  by  the  National   Science 
Foundation, which has financed the project.

  Jack  Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University  who 
directed  the investigation, said Wednesday that his group  hoped 
to  find  matches between gene fragments left  in  the  preserved 
blood  cells with comparable DNA segments from modern  crocodiles 
or birds.

   "If  we're  lucky  enough to find  matches,"  he  said,  "they 
could go a long way toward showing what the relationship  between 
dinosaurs  and birds might be. We're not there yet, but we  think 
we're getting close."

   Cheryl   Dybas,  a  spokeswoman  for  the   National   Science 
Foundation,  acknowledged  that  her  agency  had   intentionally 
released  its  report of Horner's progress to coincide  with  the 
opening of "Jurassic Park," a science-fiction movie based on  the 
premise  that  dinosaurs  might  one day  be  cloned  from  their 
surviving DNA.

   The femur, or leg bone, Horner's group is studying is part  of 
an  unusually  well-preserved tyrannosaur fossil,  more  than  65 
million  years old, which they found and excavated from the  Hell 
Creek Formation in eastern Montana three years ago. The  apparent 
blood cells were discovered by Mary Schweitzer, Horner's graduate 
student, who was investigating the histology, or cell  structure, 
of fossilized bone and marrow tissue.

   In  the  past,  few paleontologists  or  molecular  biologists 
believed  that biological material could survive for millions  of 
years  without  becoming  mineralized, thus  losing  its  organic 
molecular  structure.  The  survival of  any  intact  DNA,  which 
ordinarily  decays  with time, seemed even less likely.  But  the 
recent discovery of organic material and even fragments of DNA in 
ancient plant and animal fossils has changed opinions.

   "Two  years ago I would have called this baloney,"  said  Raul 
Cano  of  California  Polytechnic State University  at  San  Luis 
Obispo,  a  molecular  biologist who has  himself  extracted  DNA 
fragments  from fossilized insects and plants millions  of  years 
old.

   "It's  certainly plausible," Cano said. "We have seen  similar 
things  ourselves."  Earlier this month Cano and  his  associates 
reported in the journal Nature that they had extracted DNA from a 
weevil  that  had been entombed in amber for 120 million  to  135 
million years.

   Molecular   biologist  Russell  Higuchi,  who   has   strongly 
questioned  the premise that appreciable quantities of DNA  could 
survive  for  eons,  said Wednesday that  it  was  possible  that 
Horner's group has actually seen dinosaur blood cells.

   "We  ourselves  speculated 10 years ago that if  dinosaur  DNA 
survived  at all, it might be found" deep inside a  fossil  bone, 
said Higuchi, of Roche Molecular Systems in Alameda, Calif.

   Horner  said  that  microscopic examination of  a  thin  slice 
through the dinosaur bone revealed that although its outer layers 
were mineralized, the bone itself, brown in color, remained  more 
or less intact in the interior of the marrow cavity.

   Mary  found spherical structures that appear to  be  nucleated 
red  cells  inside the blood vessels running  through  the  bone, 
right where you'd expect to find blood, if it's there," he said.

   Part of the science foundation's grant to Horner's group  went 
for laboratory equipment to conduct a polymerase chain  reaction, 
a technique that can single out a lone molecular fragment of  DNA 
and  make  enough  copies so it can be  analyzed  using  standard 
methods.

   "The biggest problem is contamination of the fossil by foreign 
DNA,"  Horner said. "There's lots of it there. The real trick  is 
in  identifying something that is not a contaminant. This is  why 
we  are  looking for matches with crocodile DNA, which is  not  a 
likely contaminant."

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1993 23:57:15 GMT
% From: Ron Baalke <[email protected]>
% To: [email protected]
% Subject: Dinosaur Blood Found?

Article: 3558
From: [email protected] (UPI)
Newsgroups: clari.news.movies,clari.local.los_angeles,clari.tw.computers
Subject: 'Jurassic Park' effects secrets to come out in seminar
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 17:05:28 PDT
 
	LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- The Hollywood trade secrets behind the earth-
shaking mechanical and computer-generated dinosaurs of ``Jurassic Park''
will be revealed at an upcoming American Film Institute seminar.

	``Behind the Scenes of 'Jurassic Park','' taking place Aug. 26-29,
returns many of the special-effects designers and engineers to the
Hawaiian island of Kauai, where the blockbuster was filmed last summer.

	The four-day event includes a seminar on the film's production,
promotion and publicity, telling how it went from one of the most costly
projects on any studio's drawing boards to the third highest-grossing
film ever, as of this week.

	The conference is co-sponsored by the newly developed Kauai Institute
for Communications Media, Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.


Article: 3559
From: [email protected] (DAVE McNARY, UPI Business Writer)
Newsgroups: clari.news.movies
Subject: 'Jurassic Park' now No. 3 on all-time list
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 17:05:28 PDT
 
	HOLLYWOOD (UPI) -- The dinosaurs from ``Jurassic Park'' showed
Wednesday they have not yet run out of steam when the movie hit No. 3 on
the all-time list after eight weeks.

	The Universal release, still playing at 2,141 theaters, took in $1
million on Monday and $1.1 million on Tuesday to push its 55-day gross
to $285.2 million. It was expected to gross at least another $1 million
on Wednesday to move its total to $286.2 million and push it past ``Home
Alone'' at $285.7 million.

	It should sell about $5 million in tickets during the upcoming
weekend, a pace that will move it past the $300 million mark in less
than two weeks.

	``Jurassic Park'' set records for biggest late-night preview ($3.1
million); biggest three-day opening weekend ($47.1 million); biggest
second weekend ($38.5 million); fastest to reach $100 million (10 days)
and fastest to reach $200 million (24 days).

	Final domestic grosses could match the $322 million taken in by 
``Star Wars,'' the No. 2 grosser of all time, but probably will fall
short of the nearly $400 million taken in by ``E.T. -- The Extraterrestrial.''

	The totals for ``E.T.'' and ``Star Wars'' include grosses from
reissues. The original gross for ``E.T.'' was $359.2 million, while 
``Star Wars'' took in $286.8 million in its first run.

	Both ``E.T.'' and ``Jurassic Park'' were produced by Steven Spielberg
and released by Universal. Spielberg also has ``Jaws'' and ``Raiders of
the Lost Ark'' on the top 10 list.

	Foreign grosses for ``Jurassic Park'' topped $100 million over the
weekend, less than three weeks after its major overseas release.

	Universal executives say they want to beat the $645 million taken in
by ``E.T.'' since Universal released it in 1982.

	``Jurassic Park'' has led a revival in the domestic film box office,
with July ticket sales hitting a record $721.9 million, a stunning 44
percent higher than July 1992. Monthly sales were 140.7 million at an
average price of $5.13, compared with 100.3 million tickets at an
average price of $5.01.

	After nine weeks, the seasonal take of $1.42 billion is up 26 percent
from last summer and 4 percent above 1989, the current record summer.
The 1993 season has an excellent chance of topping the 1989 record of
$2.04 billion, when ``Batman,'' ``Lethal Weapon 2'' and ``Indiana Jones
and the Last Crusade'' were released.

	The 10 top-grossing movies, year of release, total gross:

	1. ``E.T. -- The Extraterrestrial,'' 1982, $399.8 million.
	2. ``Star Wars,'' 1977, $322 million.
	3. ``Jurassic Park,'' 1993, $286.2 million.
	4. ``Home Alone,'' 1990, $285.7 million.
	5. ``Return of the Jedi,'' 1983, $263 million.
	6. ``Jaws,'' 1975, $260 million.
	7. ``Batman,'' 1989, $251.2 million.
	8. ``Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' 1981, $242.4 million.
	9. ``Beverly Hills Cop,'' 1984, $234.8 million.
	10. ``The Empire Strikes Back,'' 1980, $223 million.

Article: 3560
From: [email protected] (VALERIE KUKLENSKI)
Newsgroups: clari.news.movies,clari.local.los_angeles,clari.tw.computers
Subject: 'Jurassic Park' effects secrets to come out in seminar
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 93 17:59:47 PDT
 
	LOS ANGELES (UPI) -- The Hollywood trade secrets behind the earth-
shaking mechanical and computer-generated dinosaurs of ``Jurassic Park''
will be revealed at an upcoming American Film Institute seminar.

	``Behind the Scenes of 'Jurassic Park','' taking place Aug. 26-29,
returns many of the special-effects designers and engineers to the
Hawaiian island of Kauai, where the blockbuster was filmed last summer.

	The four-day event includes a seminar on the film's production,
promotion and publicity, telling how it went from one of the most costly
projects on any studio's drawing boards to the third highest-grossing
film ever, as of this week.

	The conference is co-sponsored by the newly developed Kauai Institute
for Communications Media, Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

	Beth Taylor Hart of AFI said Wednesday that this is the first of
annual summer meetings by AFI and the Kauai institute, a new non-profit
communications think tank and training center developed to attract
entertainment business to the island hardest hit last September by
Hurricane Iniki.

	Hart said initial response to this year's topic shows it appeals to a
diverse group, from top studio executives and struggling filmmakers to
two teenagers willing to pay the $200 student fee and expenses to
satisfy their curiosity about the summer's top movie.

	The scheduled sessions will explore the planning and execution of the
prehistoric creatures, some of them life-sized mecahnical robots and
others complex electronic images no bigger than a computer screen.

	Author-screenwriter Michael Crichton also will discuss the sale of
his popular novel to Universal and writing the first draft of the screenplay.

	While many moviegoers see ``Jurassic Park'' as the ultimate in visual
and sound effects, Hart said the sessions also will look toward new
discoveries and future trends in high-tech filmmaking.

    Re .79:
    
    I think it's interesting that, of the ten top-grossing movies, seven of
    them have fantastic elements (including SFish elements), and that's not
    even including "Jaws."
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    I think it's even more amazing that four of the top ten were
    directed by the same man, and three others were directed/produced
    by one other man, and that these two men are colleagues and friends.

Uh oh, Andrew, sounds like the Illuminati are at work here! :*) It does seem to
indicate what we (we the people) want mostly excitment when we go to the movies.
I know I do. I get my thought provoking moments from books. I want thrills on
the big screen. liesl

    >Uh oh, Andrew, sounds like the Illuminati are at work here! :*) 
    
    	Hmm -- never thought of that -- you must be right! %^}
    
    >It does seem to indicate what we (we the people) want mostly excitment
    >when we go to the movies. I know I do. I get my thought provoking
    >moments from books. I want thrills on the big screen. liesl
    
    	Ditto -- I rarely go to see films -- I go to see movies!
    
    					andrew

Article: 1072
Newsgroups: alt.books.reviews,rec.arts.books
From: [email protected] (Steve Brock)
Subject: Review of Gift Edition of Jurassic Park
Sender: [email protected] (news)
Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1993 23:14:24 GMT
 
JURASSIC PARK: THE GIFT EDITION by Michael Crichton.  Alfred A.
Knopf, 201 E. 50th St., N.Y., NY  10022, (800) 638-6460, (212) 572-
2593 FAX.  Illustrated.  461 pp., $35.00 cloth.  0-679-43062-8
 
                             REVIEW
 
     Don't worry, this isn't a review of "Jurassic Park."  I'm sure
you've read too many of those as it is in rec.arts.books, from the
book, to the movie, to their comparisons.  Those desiring more are
directed to alt.masochism. 

     I do, though, want to mention an appropriate gift for the person who 
loved the book version of "Jurassic Park," that was released last week. 

     The gift edition of the book, signed by the author and
illustrated with twelve full color plates of dinosaurs (no artist
attribution), has the words "Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton"
printed on the cloth cover.  The triceratops skeleton from the
hardcover edition now appears on a clear vinyl jacket. 

     This is an appropriate gift for paleontologists, chaos
theoreticians, or those who dream of grandiose schemes. 

Article: 3732
From: [email protected] (UPI)
Newsgroups: clari.news.gov.international,clari.news.movies
Subject: Pirated version of 'Jurassic Park' shown on Ural Mountains TV
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 93 5:39:18 PDT
 
	YEKATERINBURG, Russia (UPI) -- A pirated video of the hit film 
``Jurassic Park'' was shown on local television in the Ural Mountains
city of Yekaterinburg -- before the film has been released on video
anywhere in the world.

	The film, about an amusement park populated by living dinosaurs
recreated through genetic engineering, was broadcast Sunday night in
Yekaterinburg, 1,040 miles (1,670 km) east of Moscow, the hometown of
Russian President Boris Yeltsin. ``Jurassic Park'' has not been
officially released in Russia.

	The illicit showing of the hit film highlights the problem of video
piracy in Russia, where copyrights are routinely flouted and the giant
video market is dominated by illegal copies of U.S. films dubbed into
Russian.

	The U.S. government has pressed Moscow for new laws to ensure that
local distributors respect foreign copyrights. Two years ago, the Motion
Picture Association of America boycotted the Moscow International Film
Festival to protest the number of pirated U.S. films on the burgeoning
Russian video market. Neither action had any appreciable effect.

	Pirated films usually reach the Russian market as illegal copies of
authorized video cassettes or laser disks purchased in the United States
or Western Europe.

	But ``Jurassic Park'' has not yet been released anywhere on video or
laser disk. The version shown in Yekaterinburg was apparently shot by an
amateur video camera smuggled into a movie theater in the Unites States,
Europe or Asia. The picture appeared to have been shot from an angle,
and the sound of the theater audience was distinctly audible. At one
point an audience member was seen to get up from his seat.

	The Universal Pictures film has broken box office records in several
countries by grossing $306 million after 74 days in release. New foreign
releases are virtually never shown in Russia because of the piracy problem.

Article: 3956
From: [email protected] (DAVE McNARY, UPI Business Writer)
Newsgroups: clari.news.movies,clari.news.consumer
Subject: 'Jurassic Park' goes past 'Star Wars' at box office
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 93 15:46:34 PDT
 
	HOLLYWOOD (UPI) -- Dino-mania remained strong enough after
nearly four months for ``Jurassic Park'' to become No. 2 on the list
of top-grossing films in the domestic market, edging past the ``Star
Wars'' mark on Sunday. 

	In its 15th weekend Universal's ``Jurassic Park'' finished
seventh at the box office with $2.1 million at 1,225 screens, bringing
its 102-day total to $322.1 million. 

	That was enough to nudge the dinosaur thriller past the $322
million taken in by ``Star Wars.'' The ``Star Wars'' tally included about 
$280 million in its initial release and another $40 million from reissues. 

	``Jurassic Park'' now trails only ``E.T. -- The Extra
Terrestrial,'' which grossed $359 million in its 1982 release plus $40
million from reissues. 

	``Jurassic Park'' also has gone past $300 million in foreign
markets to set a record for a first-release film. It topped the $290
million taken overseas by the 1990 hit ``Ghost.'' It has yet to open
in several major markets, including France. 

Article: 2085
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.reviews,rec.arts.sf.reviews
From: [email protected] (Evelyn C. Leeper)
Subject: REVIEW: JURASSIC PARK
Organization: Network World
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 17:12:39 GMT
Sender: [email protected] (Evelyn C. Leeper)
 
[Followups directed to rec.arts.sf.movies.  -Moderator]
 
				  JURASSIC PARK
		       A security analysis by Michel E. Kabay
			  Copyright 1993 Network World
 
IS YOUR SECURITY PROCESS A DINOSAUR?
 
     The current hit movie JURASSIC PARK stars several holdovers from
65 million years ago.  It also shows errors in network security that
seem to be as old.
 
     For those of you who have just returned from Neptune, JURASSIC
PARK is about a dinosaur theme park that displays live dinosaurs
created after scientists cracked extinct dinosaur DNA code recovered
from petrified mosquitos.  The film has terrific live action dinosaur
replicas and some heart stopping scenes.  It also dramatizes awful
network management and security.  Unfortunately, the policies are as
realistic as the dinosaurs.
 
     Consider a network security risk analysis for Jurassic Park.  The
entire complex depends on computer controlled electric fences and gates
to keep a range of prehistoric critters from eating the tourists and
staff.  So at a simple level, if the network fails, people turn into
dinosaur food.
 
     Jurassic Park's security network is controlled by an ultramodern
UNIX system, but its management structures date from the Stone Age.
There is only one person who maintains the programs which control the
security network.  This breaks Kabay's Law of Redundancy, which states,
"No knowledge shall be the property of only one member of the team."
After all, if that solitary guru were to leave, go on vacation, or get
eaten by a dinosaur, you'd be left without a safety net.
 
     Jurassic Park's security system is controlled by computer programs
consisting of two million lines of proprietary code.  These critical
programs are not properly documented.  An undocumented system is by
definition a time bomb.  In the movie, this bomb is triggered by a
vindictive programmer who is angry because he feels overworked and
underpaid.
 
     One of the key principles of security is that people are the most
important component of any security system.  Disgruntled and dishonest
employees cause far more damage to networks and computer systems than
hackers.  The authoritarian owner of the Park dismisses the programmer's
arguments and complaints as if owning a bunch of dinosaurs gives him
the privilege of treating his employees rudely.  He pays no attention to
explicit indications of discontent, including aggressive language,
resentful retorts, and sullen expressions.  If the owner had taken the
time to listen to his employee's grievances and take steps to address
them, he could have prevented several dinosaur meals.
 
     Bad housekeeping is another sign of trouble.  The console where
the disgruntled programmer works looks like a garbage dump; it's
covered in coffee cup fungus gardens, historically significant
chocolate bar wrappers, and a treasure trove of recyclable soft drink
cans.  You'd think that a reasonable manager would be alarmed simply by
the number of empty calories per hour being consumed by this critically
important programmer.  The poor fellow is so overweight that his life
expectancy would be short even if he didn't become dinosaur fodder.
 
     Ironically, the owner repeats, "No expense spared" at several
points during the movie.  It doesn't seem to occur to him that with
hundreds of millions of dollars spent on hardware and software not to
mention the buildings and grounds and an entire private island, modest
raises for the staff would be trivial in terms of operating expenses
but significant for morale.
 
     In the movie, the network programmer is bribed by competitors to
steal dinosaur embryos.  He does so by setting off a logic bomb that
disrupts network operations completely.  The network outage causes
surveillance and containment systems to fail, stranding visitors in,
well, uncomfortable situations.  Even though the plot is not exactly
brilliant, I'd like to leave at least something to surprise those who
haven't seen the movie yet.
 
     When the systems fail, for some reason all the electric locks in
the park's laboratory are instantly switched to the open position.  Why
aren't they automatically locked instead? Normally, when a security
controller fails, the default should be to keep security high, not
eliminate it completely.  Manual overrides such as crash bars (the
horizontal bars that open latches on emergency exits) can provide
emergency egress without compromising security.
 
     As all of this is happening, a tropical storm is bearing down on
the island.  The contingency plan appears to consist of sending almost
everyone away to the mainland, leaving a pitifully inadequate skeleton
crew.  The film suggests that the skeleton crew is not in physical
danger from the storm, so why send essential personnel away?
Contingency plans are supposed to include redundancy at every level.
Reducing the staff when more are needed is incomprehensible.
 
     At one point, the systems are rebooted by turning the power off to
the entire island on which the park is located.  This is equivalent to
turning the power off in your city because you had an application
failure on your PC.  Talk about overkill: why couldn't they just power
off the computers themselves?
 
     Where were the DPMRP (Dinosaur Prevention, Mitigation and Recovery
Planning) consultants when the park was being designed? Surely
everybody should know by now that the only way to be ready for
dinosaurs, uh, disasters, is to think, plan, rehearse, refine and
update.  Didn't anyone think about what would happen if the critters
got loose? Where are the failsafe systems? The uninterruptible power
supplies? The backup power generators? Sounds like Stupidosaurians were
in charge.
 
     We may be far from cloning dinosaurs, but we are uncomfortably
close to managing security with all the grace of a Brontosaurus trying
to type.
 
     I hope you see the film.  And bring your boss.
 
Best wishes, Mich
 
Michel E.  Kabay, Ph.D.
Director of Education
National Computer Security Association
 
The above text is Copyright (c) 1993 by Network World.  All rights reserved.
 
Permission is granted by the copyright holder and the author to distribute
this file electronically or otherwise as long as the entire file is printed
without modification.
 

�     When the systems fail, for some reason all the electric locks in
�the park's laboratory are instantly switched to the open position.  Why
�aren't they automatically locked instead? Normally, when a security
�controller fails, the default should be to keep security high, not
�eliminate it completely.  Manual overrides such as crash bars (the
�horizontal bars that open latches on emergency exits) can provide
�emergency egress without compromising security.
 
The author assumes the system failed, but it didn't, it was sabotaged, so
that Nedry could go anywhere in the complex he wanted to.

-Patrick

    	The Boston (MA) Museum of Science is hosting The Dinosaurs of 
    Jurassic Park from October 9, 1993 to January 9, 1994.  Whether these 
    are the actual models from the film or just models of the dinosaurs 
    featured in the film is not stated.  Call for advanced tickets.
    
    	Larry
    

> Jurassic Park's security network is controlled by an ultramodern
> UNIX system, but its management structures date from the Stone Age.

There's a hoot - yet another glowing reference to UNIX.  You all know about
UNIX, don't you?  It's that operating system that's been the "wave of the
future in computing" for, what, over 20 years now?

Sheesh...

-- FooBear

    	NOVA will be broadcasting a program on the real possibilities
    of doing what they did in JP on Tuesday, November 9, at 8 p.m. in
    the Boston area on Channel 2, WGBH.
    
    	Larry
    

    Don't know if anyone is still reading this note, but I was wondering...
    
    Now that it's almost a year since Jurassic Park came and went in the
    theatres, will it ever be out on video or laserdisc ??? Anyone have
    real data on this ?
    

    Yes, I was at Suncoast, and they are reserving copies, I think it's
    supposed to be coming out in June, but don't quote me.
    
    Michael
    

    It's still in some theaters; in fact, I vaguely recall a blurb on some
    show (Entertainment Tonight?) that said they were approaching $1 billion
    over the almost full year run in movie theaters.
    
    Dave

    I was in London a couple of weeks ago and it was still in the theaters.

From:	FLAMBE::"[email protected]" 16-MAY-1994 14:32:46.87
To:	Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
CC:	
Subj:	NBA Toronto Team Gets Jurassic Name

NBA-Toronto Team gets Jurassic Name - 5/13/94

	 TORONTO (Reuter) - Toronto's new National Basketball
Association team is likely to take the name of a long-dead
dinosaur made famous in the blockbuster Stephen Spielberg movie
Jurassic Park, Canadian newspapers reported.

	 Canada's three main newspapers all reported Friday that
Toronto's NBA expansion team will be called the Raptors, a
shortened version of the name for the velociraptor dinosaur.

	 The name was chosen from a list of three finalists by team
and NBA officials after a nationwide vote cut the original list
of 10 to a toss-up between Raptors, Dragons and Bobcats.

	 The name and logo of Canada's first NBA team will be
officially unveiled on Sunday in Toronto.

	 The Toronto Star, Sun and the Globe and Mail all reported
the new team's name as the ``Raptors''. The Star said the team's
logo will be a snarling dinosaur dribbling a basketball.

	 The Raptors are due to begin play in the 1995-96 NBA season.

    Unfortunately, this means a perfectly usable word will be forever
    misused.  Raptors aren't dinosaurs.  They are hunters, usually 
    birds of prey (hawks, falcons, and the like).  Not all dinosaurs 
    were raptors, and not all raptors are dinosaurs.
    
    					andrew

    
    If you happen to think birds evolved from dinosaurs, "raptors" isn't
    that far off the mark. Of course, this team is already being referred
    to as the
    
    
                           Torontosauruses
    
    so the official name may be moot already.
    
    JP

    
    
>                           Torontosauruses
    
    	BA-hahaha - I *like* it . ..
    
    						- JC

From:	US4RMC::"[email protected]" "MAIL-11 Daemon" 26-MAY-1994 
To:	[email protected]
CC:	
Subj:	Jurassic Park Video to be Released in October

Jurassic Park set for video release
5/25/94

	 UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. (Reuter) - ``Jurassic Park,'' Steven
Spielberg's blockbuster dinosaur thriller, is poised to storm into the
home video market this fall, MCA/Universal Home Video said Wednesday. 

	 The MCA Inc. unit said it is preparing a marketing blitz
designed to reach 98 percent of the adult population in the United
States a total of 25.2 times. 

	 The video is to be released on Oct. 4.

	 ``Jurassic Park,'' released by MCA's Universal Pictures film
studio, has grossed close to $900 million at box offices worldwide,
making it the highest-grossing film ever. 

	 The videocassette will be priced at $24.95.

	 MCA/Universal Home Video said it has established ``Jurassic
Park'' sign-up centres to pre-sell and promote the video. Customers
who reserve copies will receive a ``Jurassic Park'' print of the
dinosaur illustrations from the film. 

	 The company also will offer rebates with the purchase of
related promotional products, a national sweepstakes and a tie-in with
McDonald's, offering the sale of other videos from Universal. 

% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date: Thu, 26 May 1994 15:58:41 GMT
% From: Ron Baalke <[email protected]>
% To: [email protected]
% Subject: Jurassic Park Video to be Released in October
% Sender: [email protected]

Article: 628
From: [email protected] (Rob Slade)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: "Jurassic Park" by Crichton
Date: 20 Jun 1994 19:49:54 GMT
Organization: DECUS Canada Communications
Sender: [email protected] (Michael C. Berch)
 
Crichton doesn't know an awful lot about computers either.  A number of
the programming bugs that he cites/proposes could have been lifted from
the RISKS.FORUM Digest, but that is why no software house would touch a
realtime development project like that without being able to see the
hardware.  An "assumption" is made that hides an important factor in
the story, but this also assumes that, during the whole test period, no
animal was ever out of sight of the monitors, that no count was ever
done after animals died, and that the veterinarian didn't notice that
some of the populations under his care doubled.
 
Crichton also has to fall back on chaos theory to explain what every
programmer knows already:  some projects are too big.  This was amply
demonstrated during the "Star Wars" debacle without recourse to
black-robed eccentrics.  It is likely that the mathematician, Ian
Malcolm, is Crichton's alter ego.  Although Crichton kills him off,
Malcolm is right, cheerful, and personable for all his hurling of
jeremiads.  He also gets the best speeches, and most of the best lines.
 
One of the speeches Malcolm gets, though, is exceptionally applicable
to the hacker community.  On page 306 of the paperback version (about
midway through the "Control" chapter of "Fifth Iteration") there is a
speech about how scientific knowledge is a form of inherited wealth and
is acquired without discipline.  There may be a germ of truth in that,
although it may come as a surprise to many scientists who have put long
years into their discipline and research.  In the computer world,
however, it is very definitely true.  The subtitle of Steven Levy's
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" may not be true of all of
the computer community, but it certainly seems to be the general
attitude that the public holds.  The computer community has very few
"grand old men" but a substantial number of young icons whose only
prodigious achievement lies in being able to so trivialize their focus
that they can believe that flying toasters are important.
 
(Crichton also doesn't know anything about boats.  In a last
minute-what else- attempt to prevent an escape of animals to the
mainland, Crichton has the Captain order, "Full ahead stern."  I guess
that means you paint a scary face on the bow before you rush the dock.)
 
%A   Crichton
%T   Jurassic Park
%I   Ballantine/Fawcett/Columbine Books
%C   New York
%D   1990
%G   ISBN 0-345-37077-5
%O   USD5.99 / CAD6.99
 
copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994   BKJURPRK.RVW  940411
 
======================
DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters
Editor and/or reviewer [email protected], [email protected], Rob Slade at 1:153/733
BCVAXLUG ConVAXtion, Vancouver, BC, Oct. 13 & 14, 1994 contact [email protected]
 

From:	FLAMBE::"[email protected]" 12-SEP-1994 15:04:32.72
To:	Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
CC:	
Subj:	Black Market Amber Trade Flourishes on Baltic Coast

BLACK MARKET TRADE IN AMBER FLOURISHES ON BALTIC COAST

By ROWLINSON CARTER

London Observer Service - 9/12/94

LONDON - Thanks to "Jurassic Park," one of the easiest ways to make
money in Poland and Lithuania is to set up a stall selling jewelery
and trinkets made of amber - the fossilized pine resin that, entangled
in seaweed, has been washed up along the Baltic shoreline since time
immemorial. 

How insects become suspended in a state of perfect preservation inside
lumps of amber used to be one of childhood's great mysteries. 

Even the acerbic 18th-century poet Alexander Pope was moved to muse:

"Pretty in amber, to observe the forms,/Of Hairs, or straws, or dirt,
or grubs or worms;/The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare,/But
wonder how the devil they got there." 

Today, any child of the Spielberg age will tell you exactly how they
got there. How insects unwisely alighted on the oozing resin, got
stuck, were gradually cocooned and, over the next 40 million years,
fossilized. As forests were swamped by the rising seas, these insect
tombs formed a layer just beneath the seabed which then became plowed
up by passing icebergs. Eventually they were blown ashore by storms
mostly in the Baltics but sometimes as far away as the east coast of
England. 

Steven Spielberg's fictitious thesis was that one of these unfortunate
insects, a mosquito, had dined on a dinosaur before becoming lodged in
amber. Modern scientists were then able to extract the dinosaur's DNA
from the mosquito and re-create the beast. 

In ancient times, the honey-colored amber was more valuable than gold.
When the tomb of the Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen, who died circa
1350 BC, was opened by Howard Carter in 1922, it was found to contain
an exquisite amber necklace. 

During World War II, there was a race between Hitler's troops and the
Red Army for possession of the Amber Room kept at Konigsberg, then
capital of East Prussia, and now renamed Kaliningrad. The Baltic coast
port was not only home to the coveted Amber Room but remains the
repository of 93 percent of the world's known reserves of amber. 

Although amber has always been in steady demand, the success of
"Jurassic Park" has heightened interest and the trinket stalls of
local entrepreneurs are now a magnet for the growing number of foreign
visitors. 

In Soviet times, Kalingrad, which lies between Lithuania and Poland,
was a military base and a no-go area for foreigners. Now there is
nothing to stop tourists taking a short bus ride from Gdansk -
nothing, that is, except fear. For the pretty amber gem has fallen
prey to a gangster underworld. 

The world market for amber, affected in part by "Jurassic Park," is
thought to be worth around $100 million per year - more than enough to
draw the attention of the Russian mafia. A combination of corruption
and red tape makes it virtually impossible to export Kaliningrad's
amber legally, but it is still being smuggled out in potato sacks and
by other means, at a rate of between 150 and 200 tons a year. The
finest amber, even unpolished and unworked, is worth $10 a gram. 

Contraband amber finds its way, via Lithuania, to Poland, where
craftsmen have traditionally fashioned it into prized jewelery. 

Prudent foreign ealers buy their amber in Gdansk, taking advantage of
Poland's more relaxed regulations. More intrepid, or perhaps greedier,
traders attempt to buy amber at its source. 

Tales are told of buyers venturing to Kaliningrad with briefcases full
of money and never being seen again. 

One who lived to tell his tale, anonymously, says the foreign number
plates on his car were his downfall.  Held by a gang armed with
sub-machine guns, he was told to leave his car, and briefcase, and
walk away.  He didn't quibble. 

In Gdansk, a British registered car that has been standing in a hotel
car park for the past eight months is said to belong to two buyers who
chose to take the Kaliningrad bus.  They have never returned. 

Kaliningrad is an exception to the general rule of post-Soviet
independence - remaining, albeit remotely, part of the Russian
federation, a link that its predominantly Russian population is
determined to retain. 

Loss of amber via the black market is blamed on the transparency of
the border with Lithuania, prompting extreme Russian nationalists to
demand nullification of the post-World War II agreement that ceded
part of the coast of former East Prussia to otherwise land-locked
Lithuania.  Such a move would deprive Lithuania of its port, Klaipeda. 

It is this context that amber is seen as partly responsible for
Lithuanians talking darkly of a provocation that would amount to
nothing less than war. 

From:	FLAMBE::"[email protected]" 13-SEP-1994 07:21:45.03
To:	Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
CC:	
Subj:	Re: Black Market Amber Trade Flourishes on Baltic Coast

> During World War II, there was a race between Hitler's troops and the Red Army
> for possession of the Amber Room kept at Konigsberg, then capital of East
> Prussia, and now renamed Kaliningrad. The Baltic coast port was not only home
> the coveted Amber Room but remains the repository of 93 percent of the world's
> known reserves of amber.

This part of the story is a little garbled.  The Amber Room was originally 
built in the Tsar's Summer Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, about 15 miles from 
St Petersburg.  It was a room whose walls were entirely coverd in amber!  
The palace fell into German hands during World War II, and they stripped 
the room when they retreated.  The amber was lost at the end of World War 
II and nobody knows what became of it.  

When I visited the Summer Palace about 12 years ago I was told that the 
then Soviet Government were trying to rebuild the Amber Room with fresh 
amber.  I don't know if they managed to complete it, or if the work is 
still ongoing under the new regime.

Martin

From:	FLAMBE::"[email protected]" 13-SEP-1994 17:21:57.72
To:	Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
CC:	
Subj:	Speilberg Plans Jurassic Park Sequel

Spielberg Planning Sequel to Mega-Dino Blockbuster
9/11/94

NEW YORK (AP) - Director-producer Steven Spielberg plans a sequel to
"Jurassic Park," one of the biggest box-office successes of all time,
but fans will have to wait more than two years, Forbes reported Sunday. 

The magazine made the disclosure in its Sept. 27 issue cover story
about the Top 40 best-paid entertainers, which Spielberg led with
estimated 1993-94 gross earnings of $335 million. 

Forbes said the dinosaurs-come-back-to-life thriller was a major
contributor to Spielberg's wealth, grossing $900 million at the box
office. Sales of Jurassic Park-related merchandise generated an
additional $1 billion. 

In an interview with Forbes, Spielberg said he plans to make a sequel
to open for the summer 1997 movie season, renouncing his one-time
aversion to sequels as a "cheap carny trick." 

"It's not so precious to me and I'm not so personal about 'Jurassic
Park' that I have any reason not to give the audience what they want,"
he told Forbes. 

It was pretty obvious that they were setting up for a sequel.
Spoilers below if you haven't read the book
































...but the book ends a lot differently.  Malcom (chaos expert) and I forget
his name, but the founder of Jurassic Park, both die and Jurassic Park is
destroyed in a huge conflagration.  Interestingly, the lawyer lives, as
he is one of the first killed in the movie.  I wonder if they'll try to 
add in some of the scenes that they didn't do in the movie.  The encounter
with the Tyrannosaurus was suspenseful, but not half as suspenseful as
in the book where they were chased by the damn thing for a number of
chapters.  This includes a river journey which takes them through the
pterodactyl habitat, and some interesting attacks from the sky.  My memory
is somewhat hazy on some of this, but I went into the movie with book,
being on the last few pages at the time, and was very sure that the 
differences made a sequel quite possible.

PeterT

    
    	Yes, it is possible:
    
    
    	There was still a vial of genetic material that hadn't been
    	destroyed.
    
    							GTI

    	And don't forget that...
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
        some of the smarter dinos had escaped to the mainland of 
    South America.
    

  

re:  The vial -  You mean the one stolen by the programmer?  He never got to
meet his boat, just his fate.  Or was there another one?

re: the dino's on the mainland - Yeah, the book opened with these, but I
thought most had died, or been killed off.  And they were just the little
campto's.  Which isn't to say that some others couldn't have made
it to the mainland too.  Wasn't it the junior raptors that were on the
boat that almost, but not quite, made it to the mainland?  I thought
they were discovered in time, but maybe I'm misremembering something.

But regardless, the movie was a lot more open-ended than the book was.

PeterT

RE: the stolen embryos.

As I remember, that shaving cream canister would keep the embryos viable for
only 36 hours. Maybe it was 72 hours, I'm not sure. By the time of the
rescue, at _least_ twelve hours had passed already.  That, and the fact that
the can was in the middle of nowhere, covered in gook, to say nothing about
the fact that there are still dilophisauri lurking about, makes it hard for
me to believe that they can come up with a plausible way of recovering them. 
'Course, there's still all those embryos back at the lab... Providing they
weren't destroyed when the power went off.  Nedry certainly wouldn't have
concerned himself with those embryos.  Perhaps it was on a UPS?

Anyway, I hope there's a stegosaurus in the sequel!

-Patrick

From:	FLAMBE::"[email protected]" 14-SEP-1994 20:12:59.47
To:	Multiple recipients of list <[email protected]>
CC:	
Subj:	Rich Cache of Amber Mined in Caribbean

RICH CACHE OF AMBER MINED IN CARIBBEAN
By LAURA RANDALL

SANTIAGO, Dominican Republic - High in the hills surrounding this city
in the Cibao Valley, hundreds of narrow openings tunnel into the
world's second-richest cache of amber. 

For scientists, the ancient tree resin found in the tunnels brings a
glimpse into primeval life in the West Indies through perfectly
preserved prehistoric creatures. 

For mine owners like Ramon Martinez, the tunnels mean annual sales of
about $25,000 in a country where the per-capita income is less than
$500 a year. 

For amber miners and their families, the tunnels mean three meals a
day and perpetuation of a family occupation. 

Gemlike in its rich shades of gold, orange, brown and, rarely, blue,
the fossilized tree sap has been used as a decoration and good-luck
charm since the Stone Age. 

The largest and most accessible source is the Baltic coast, where
resin is easily mined in shoreline deposits and sometimes even washes
up on beaches. 

Amber is also mined in southeastern Mexico, Canada, China, the Middle
East, Alaska, Australia and New Zealand. 

But it is in the dense subtropical hills of this poor Caribbean
country that some of the most valuable amber samples - those
containing the prehistoric insects - are found. 

Millions of years ago, trees from now-vanished forests produced a
sticky resin that slowly hardened into iridescent clumps. Often the
hardening sap became a premature tomb for an unlucky grasshopper or tick. 

Today, a piece of amber with such contents is worth thousands of
dollars. A rock with a 30 million-year-old lizard trapped inside is
worth about $15,000, Martinez says. 

Not long ago, Dominican miners tossed out such pieces, believing them
to be flawed and worthless. Now, proceeds from such a find can feed a
miner's family for months. 

Martinez employs five teams of seven or eight men to extract amber
from his mines. Dominican miners earn about $10 a day, according to
some industry sources - twice the average salary of their counterparts
in the sugar cane and coffee fields, the country's main sources of income. 

"They live simply, but they're not destitute," says Patrick Fagg, a
jeweler who sells amber in the northern resort town of Sosua. 

Most miners live near the tunnels in the Cordillera Septentional
mountain range in huts made of tin or palm leaves. 

They spend their days about 180 meters underground, where they crouch
or lie in the light of flickering candles, chipping the amber out of
hard rock. 

Despite long hours and high risks, most amber miners wouldn't consider
leaving the trade into which they were born, says George O. Poinar
Jr., a paleobiologist at the University of California at Berkeley and
author of several books on amber. 

About 500 families work in the amber mines of the north-central Cibao
Valley, Martinez says. The miners' age range, he says, is 10 to 60. 

Martinez, 42, has worked in the amber business for 30 years. As a
teen-ager, he and his brothers followed his uncle to Santiago's mines
to buy small pieces of amber. It was about the time the Dominican
government began to see amber's potential as a mineral export. 

In his tiny shop in a large, run-down market on the outskirts of town,
Martinez shaves and polishes the crude amber brought in daily from his
mines. He sells it to buyers from Japan, Italy, and the United States. 

Three years ago, he provided American movie producers with a piece of
amber containing an ancient mosquito.  It inspired an incident in the
1993 movie "Jurassic Park." 

In the film, scientists use dinosaur blood inside the mosquito to
reconstruct and clone dinosaurs. 

Dominican amber sales jumped fivefold in the aftermath of the
science-fiction hit, Martinez says. The movie also spawned a thriving
counterfeit amber industry. 

Street vendors around the world sell unwitting tourists realistic
plastic pieces that sometimes contain newly dead frogs or lizards. 

"There are some spectacular forgeries out there," David Grimaldi, an
entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York,
tells National Geographic. 

One way to tell the difference: True amber, when rubbed hard, emits a
pleasant pine scent. It also becomes electrically charged. 

Although demand for the semiprecious material has fallen in the past
year, scientists still consider Dominican amber unparalleled for its
fossils. 

"The preservation is unreal," says Francis Hueber, a paleobotanist at
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "We're able to dissect
the amber and expose the actual structures of a (prehistoric) insect's
muscles, eyes, jaws and nervous system." 

While miners say amber is less plentiful now than it was a decade ago,
few in the industry believe that the world's supply will be depleted
anytime soon. 

"Deposits are always being discovered," says Grimaldi. He and a team
from the American Museum recently found several significant 90
million-year-old deposits near Raritan Bay, N.J. 

Amber is removed with high-tech mining and dredging equipment in most
places. In the Dominican Republic, the miners' only tools are hammers,
chisels and calloused hands. 

In the tropical heat and humidity of the Caribbean island, "the work
is back-breaking," Poinar says. "There are numerous close calls." 

Sometimes they're too close. Last year, three Dominican miners were
crushed to death in a landslide. 

re .111
    
>Three years ago, he provided American movie producers with a piece of
>amber containing an ancient mosquito.  It inspired an incident in the
>1993 movie "Jurassic Park." 
>
>In the film, scientists use dinosaur blood inside the mosquito to
>reconstruct and clone dinosaurs.
    
    Is there some way to interpret this that makes sense? Admittedly I
    haven't seen the movie or read the book but I would have thought that
    the movie is based on the book and that the incident from the film
    comes from the book rather than having been inspired by donation of a
    piece of amber.

    My guess was that "he provided American movie producers with" THE
    piece of amber used in the movie.
    
    							Ann B.