Boffin brews up 'Jurassic Park' beer

A scientist at California Polytechnic State University has answered that most pressing of questions for would-be time travellers - assuming you survive the journey through the wormhole vortex back to the Eocene epoch, what's the beer going to be like when you get there? The answer is "smooth and spicy" with "a weird spiciness …

[Lloyd]

Hold on now

'his original aim was to "find ancient microscopic creatures that might have some kind of medical value"'

You neglected to mention that this is of medicinal value, beer is renowned for it's stress relieving qualities.

[Peter Thompson]

Other uses

I can't wait for Jurassic Thrush.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm shorry, darling.

I wash at a pale-e-ant... pale-e-oont... ancient hishtory lesshon.

>hic<

I love you. You're ma besht friend.

[Pascal Monett]

Better stay on alert

Soon the people that have sampled this jurassic beer will begin sprouting tails with pointy ends, a bone ridge on the head and extension to the jaw with an increase in jaw muscle. Their arms will shrivel to half size while their legs will double their muscle weight, then they will go on a rampage in the office and surrounding countryside, chasing down marketing execs at a blistering 25MPH.

Let me be the first to welcome our jurassically-modified dinosapiens overlords.

[Keith Hall]

Gargh!

Repeat after me 'The Eocene is not the Jurassic'. It can't be a dino-yeast you thundering idiot since apart from birds, dinosaurs had been extinct for 20 million years. This is a 45 million year old yeast. You're a 100 million years out. The nearest it came to a flipping dino was a thrush. Maybe's that's what you got a bad case of in the brain.

I know you guys like a bit of artistic license in your reporting but this is taking it a bit far.

I hope I get at least an honourable mention in FOTW.

Cheers

[Anonymous Coward]

Jurassic??

45 million isn't old enough to even be the Cretaceous.

Try Cenozoic.

[Marvin the Martian]

Sorry to rain on this parade...

... but your 45GYO beer will taste absolutely not like this concoction brewed up. The grains used now weren't around until quite a while after humans started to select them from wild varieties, oh about 1/3000 times as long ago [so let's say 15.000BC].

[Rafael]

Practical science application

Isn't he the same Dr. Cano who once tried to revive fossilized bacteria? I recall Dave Barry wrote a column about it.

Anyway, is he doing something involving prehistorical pretzels and peanuts? Give this man a huge grant!

[Anonymous Coward]

ahem, it's not Jurassic

Sorry chaps, 45 Mya is strictly post-dino, and way post-Jurassic, which ended 145 Mya. This is Eocene beer.

[Anonymous Coward]

re: making dormant

"Rather than attacking the infection full-on, they could simply put the offending organism to sleep"

45 million years out to do it ;-)

[Mike Moyle]

I've heard of wandering drunks before...

"...Lebanese weevil trapped in Burmese amber..."

...But how the hell did a Levantine weevil stagger all the way to Burma?

[Frank]

Migratory Weevils?

What's a Lebanese weevil doing in Burmese amber? Weevils can't fly. There's something not quite right with this story.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love you beer

Ahhh beer. The cause of and answer to all of life's problems.

[Jon Tocker]

@Frank

"What's a Lebanese weevil doing in Burmese amber? Weevils can't fly. There's something not quite right with this story."

Perhaps it was on a coconut carried by migratory swallows...

[Allan Dyer]

@Jon Tocker

African or European?

[Ray Foulkes]

Worried about LHC black holes?

Better to worry about about resurrecting fungi, bacteria etc from the distant past. Maybe WE are only here because THEY died out. One thing is for certain, they once were viable in the wild unlike black holes on earth. I'll skip the beer.

[Steve Bush]

Total Joke or Con

I think the beer is the hint. Ancient, DNA fragments only, go up to .8 million years last I heard. If he is trying to be serious then probably just contaminated with modern yeast.

[Anonymous John]

I wonder how strong the beer is?

Yeast stops fermenting when it can't cope with the level of alcohol it's produced. I can't see a 45 million ear old yeast having much alcohol tolerance. Something we've been breeding yeast for for a very long time.

[tony trolle]

taste report

http://www.ibabuzz.com/beer/2008/08/06/sampling-a-beer-made-with-45-million-year-old-yeast-fossil-fuels-brewing/

Funny yeast extraction was reported back in 1995 i.e.

RJ Cano, MK Borucki, 'Revival and identification of bacterial spores in 25- to 40-million-year-old Dominican amber', Science 19 May 1995:Vol. 268. no. 5213, pp. 1060 - 1064 DOI: 10.1126/science.7538699

Its only the beer angle that made the news with this new extraction.

BTW You can only get the beer in Northern California according to the company web site.

http://fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/

[E]

"...once the patents are complete..."

WTF? They're patenting a 45 million year old yeast strain they found?? God help us all against the USPTO.