Professor says dinosaur movies inaccurate, but enjoyable

A U-N-I biology professor admits he’ll be standing in line when “Jurassic Park 3” hits theatres this week. Professor Robert Seager says he’s not eager to go out in the heat and dig through bones to try and find new fossils, but he’ll go see the new film when it opens. Though Seager says the whole Jurassic plot line about D-N-A is implausible, he loves the idea of seeing dinosaurs walk the earth. So…Why do dinosaurs remain popular with people of all ages?Seager says dinosaurs are popular because they’re big, fierce and extinct, and you can’t go see one in a zoo. Seager says there are still new facts and discoveries about dinosaurs coming to light all the time, so our picture of them just keeps changing. Seager hates to throw cold water on the notion of re-creating a dinosaur. He says they’ll never be able to reconstruct a dinosaur, as there isn’t any DNA remaining.And he adds in the first “Jurassic Park” movie scientists added frog D-N-A to make their raptors and T-Rex’s, but to be closer to the original they should have used genes from a bird. Seager says it’s the kind of thing they talk about in his summer class.Seager tells students in his lecture course there are no known dinosaurs in Iowa but someone just showed him a piece of a tail bone, convincing him there are a few. Seager says there were so many kinds, from flying to giant to calm vegetarian dinosaurs, that he never gets tired of studying and teaching about them.