‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ director learns dinosaur de-extinction could come in 100 years (exclusive)

Life, uh, finds a way…sooner than, uh, we think.

Colossal Labs, the biotechnology and genetic engineering company responsible for resurrecting the once-extinct dire wolves, met with Gareth Edwards, the director behind this summer’s Jurassic World Rebirth (in theaters Wednesday). As seen in Entertainment Weekly‘s exclusive look at Edwards’ visit to their headquarters, the filmmaker learns dinosaurs could be next on the docket.

“This is the real Jurassic Park, isn’t it?” Edwards asks in the video (shown above).

“I think it’s Jurassic Park with a conservation focus,” Ben Lamm, the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, clarifies.

According to Lamm, “You can’t get dino DNA.” He debunks the fictionalized concept from Michael Crichton’s novels, which inspired the Jurassic franchise. “Amber, believe it or not, is very porous; it doesn’t hold DNA,” he explains. However, he posits, “I think you’ll have dinosaur equivalents in the next 100 years using these tools, just a more advanced version of these tools.”

The dinosaur Edwards would like to see resurrected the most — “the one that’s gonna get all the tourists,” he says — is the Tyrannosaurus rex. “It’s also gonna go very wrong,” he quickly adds.

Any fan of the Jurassic Park movies will recite that famous line from Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm (which is also referenced in the Colossal Labs video): “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Jurassic World Rebirth is another reminder of that.

Led by special ops Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and ship captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), a unit infiltrates Ile Saint-Hubert along the equator, an island teeming with dinosaurs. Their mission is to extract the DNA of the three largest creatures for a pharmaceutical company to create a life-saving drug, but they encounter the “failed attempts” — all the grossly distorted mutant dinosaurs that were too dangerous for the park.

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Edwards says that premise isn’t so farfetched. “There’s hidden cures and hidden data in all these species that we’re losing,” Lamm agrees.

Colossal Labs made headlines in May when they successfully brought back the once-extinct dire wolves. The pups are now six months old and have ballooned in size.

“It created this insane excitement around the world, not just dire wolves, but also for wolf conservation,” Lamm comments in EW’s video. “It was amazing to see the reaction in terms of this major scientific achievement that we were all sharing together. We are losing species at such an insane rate that being able to at least back them up and protect them while developing technologies for de-extinction is just a redundancy plan for conservation.”

Jurassic World Rebirth opens in theaters Wednesday.