Hey dinosaur fans! Are you excited for the next Jurassic World installment? It picks up where Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom left off, and brings back the original trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum to battle a modern world now teeming with dinosaurs. Sounds fun, right? And no, Universal didn’t pay me to write this. Although Amblin, if you’re listening, I am available.
Full disclosure: I love the Jurassic Park movies. They’re a perfect metaphor for the wonderful stupidity of humans. No matter how many times these characters see their loved ones get eaten by dinosaurs, they STILL think dino theme parks are a good idea. It’s like every time I decide to eat three chili cheese dogs and then decide to spend the next two hours on the toilet regretting it. Life finds a way. And do does diarrhea, apparently.
If you’re a “dinosaurs on the rampage” fan like me, you don’t have to wait a whole year to see dinos in the real world. You can visit Buckingham Palace right now. See, scientists recently discovered that the stone used to build Buckingham Palace is packed with thousands of microscopic fossils. Which means the Queen’s house is teeming with mini dinosaurs!
Okay, maybe not literal dinosaurs. But the Palace is built with stones made from oolitic limestone. And oolitic limestone is composed of thousands of tiny calcium carbonate structures called ooids.
These ooids are composed of even tinier mineralized organisms such as bacteria and fungi from the Jurassic period. So Buckingham Palace was built using dino DNA!
Oolitic limestone is popular for building because it is lightweight but very strong. According to researchers, Jurassic oolite was also used to construct the British Museum and St. Paul’s Cathedral. In the United States, oolite was used to build the Empire State Building and the Pentagon. This building material is found all over the world, including in structures in Australia, Germany, and China. So it really is a Jurassic World after all.
I wonder if Queen Elizabeth likes knowing that her house is filled with hundreds of thousands of little fossilized dino fungi? Let’s check in with her to find out.
She looks a little displeased. Although she also looks like I do a few hours after I’ve eaten those three chili cheese dogs. So who knows. But I like knowing that she’s not the only fossil living in Buckingham Palace, and I hope she does too.