CNN reports that life has kind of found a way, with news coming that scientists have discovered the mummified tail of a dinosaur, preserved in amber. And, as many, many people have already pointed out, that means we’re now one step closer to a real-life Jurassic Park, at least in the fertile realm of our (and the late Michael Crichton’s) dino-obsessed imaginations.
The tail itself—discovered in Myanmar, apparently—confirms that at least some dinosaurs did have feathers, as scientists have long believed, and is presumed to have come from a coelurosaur, a small, sparrow-sized creature with a long, mouse-like tail. (No giant T-Rex or velociraptor, unfortunately.) But before we summon Mr. DNA to come by and set his wonderful cloning machines to work, that old bastard reality has got something typically disappointed to say about this whole thing: According to the scientists who found and published on the sample, none of the creature’s DNA has been preserved across the span of 99 million years. So while we might have inched slightly closer to a world in which we’re all Chris Pratt, riding motorcycles with our pack-hunting clever girls and boys, chaos theory will have to take another shot if it wants to see hordes of tiny feathered dinos stampeding through downtown L.A.