Jim Baen's Universe

In My Opinion

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Pleistocene Park

Written by Mike Resnick

Turns out Michael Crichton had the right idea after all. He just had the wrong time frame.

As perhaps every scientist in the world has pointed out, DNA decays in considerably less than 65 million years, and you really can't substitute frog DNA for the missing stuff and still come up with T. Rex and all those other nifty dinosaurs. It simply can't be done.

So kiss the notion good-bye: there will never be a Jurassic Park.

But that doesn't mean there won't be a Pleistocene Park—and sooner than you think.

Right. The Pleistocene era has two advantages over the Jurassic era. First, it comes 138 million years later. (Yes, T. Rex was around 65 million years ago, but the Jurassic wasn't. The final 73 million years of the dinosaurs' lifetime was the Cretaceous, but Cretaceous Park just doesn't roll off the tongue like Jurassic Park.)

Second, the Pleistocene has ice. Lots of ice. At one point, during the most recent Ice Age, ice covered a goodly portion of the Earth. In places—quite possibly where you're sitting and reading this—it was between half a mile and a mile thick.

What's important about that?

Well, some of that ice never melted. It's still with us.

And it's holding some nicely-refrigerated wooly mammoths.

I can hear you snorting now: "That crazy Jurassic Park stuff!" the way people who feared and distrusted science fiction used to snort "That crazy Buck Rogers stuff!"

Only it's not so crazy.

The Japanese mounted a pair of very expensive expeditions to Siberia to find a frozen mammoth. And when I say expensive, I'm not just talking about the cost of outfitting the crew and getting them there. An awful lot of Russian Mafia hands had to be crossed with gold and silver.

The expeditions were financed by Kagoshima University and led by Kazufumi Goto, a renowned genetic researcher. And despite the cost, and the fanatical dedication of his crew, he came away without a mammoth.

But the French found one.

Their expedition was led not by a researcher, but an explorer, Bernard Buigues, who knew the local people (there aren't a lot of them in northern Siberia, and they have very little use for strangers) and enlisted their help—and lo and behold, after a few months the expedition actually came up with a fully-frozen (i.e., fresh) wooly mammoth. Even better—we'll come to why in a moment—it was a male.

Now, if that had been a movie, they would have thawed Jumbo out right then and there (and if it was an exceptionally bad movie, he'd have come to life and started ripping the clothes off the elderly scientist's beautiful daughter, who