Dinosaurs — old, fossilized and freakin’ awesome

There’s been a tendency in U.S. culture over the last half-century or so for trendsetters to… There’s been a tendency in U.S. culture over the last half-century or so for trendsetters to wax nostalgic. In the mid-’90s, big band and swing music made a comeback. In the late ’90s, everyone seemed totally enthralled with the ’70s. Here we are in early 2000s and ’70s night at your favorite club has been replaced by ’80s night, which in some cases has already begun to give way to early-’90s night.

Before reruns of “Fraiser” show up on Nick at Nite, which would make most, if not all, of us feel particularly geriatric, it’s time we start doing this nostalgia thing properly if we’re going to do it at all. We’ve got to be more hard-core in our longing for the past, and we’ve got to long for an era that isn’t so closely tied with Milli Vanilli.

It’s time we hearken back to an era free of trends and fads — it’s time for some Mesozoic Era nostalgia. It’s high time that we cloned ourselves some dinosaurs.

Last week, a group of paleontologists excavating at the Hell Creek Formation in Montana were forced to break a Tyrannosaurus rex thighbone in order to fit it onto a helicopter. Inside, they found preserved soft tissue, complete with blood vessels, and are studying it further, hoping to find completely intact cells.

“Preservation of this extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen in a dinosaur before,” said Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State and Montana State Universities, who is conducting the study. “The microstructures that look like cells are preserved in every way.”

While Schweitzer didn’t yet know if the tissue would yield dinosaur DNA, she said the lab work being done now “looks promising.”

Let’s go back 12 years. It’s 1993: Bill Clinton takes office, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls win another NBA Championship, and that summer, “Jurassic Park” hits theaters. If you remember just one of those events, chances are it’s the last one. “Jurassic Park” set off a summer of dinosaur hysteria across the country, and upon leaving the theaters, the question on everyone’s mind was, “Is this possible?”

That’s when just about every television news show or magazine decided to address the issue, and we were blitzed with experts telling us that if we got a hold of some dinosaur DNA, cloning dinosaurs would, in theory, be possible.

Now, scientists have a sample of 70 million-year-old soft tissue. If museum directors around the world are serious about making new discoveries into the eons-old world of dinosaurs, they too will start breaking open fossilized bones and searching for more.

But this begs the question: Why clone dinosaurs? If you’re not already a proponent of this, I remind you that dinosaurs are really awesome.

Once we get our hands on dinosaur DNA, the possibilities are endless. Cloning velociraptors and tyrannosaurs and conscripting them into military service might finally help to put down the insurgencies in Iraq.

CBS could spice up its programming by kicking off a new, live-action series, “The Flinstones,” silencing all those who were critical of the animated series because humans and dinosaurs never coexisted.

It’s a good bet that over time, we could domesticate them. While not everyone would be able to keep them as pets — I mean, come on, that just isn’t practical — there’d likely be a future in dinosaur ranches. And they’d almost instantly replace llamas as the trendy pack animal.

And in addition to this, dinosaurs are really, really awesome.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we left unexplored the possibility that things might go totally awry as they did in any one of the three “Jurassic Park” movies. But even given the potential that the dinosaurs might escape from their respective places of residence and destroy a major city — say, San Diego — would you really miss it?

If we’re going to take great strides in this ongoing era of scientific discovery, we must be open to making sacrifices. Having dinosaurs would so vastly improve our society that their coolness would outweigh any negatives they might bring with them, like diseases and the possibility of being eaten.

Dinosaurs have captivated human imagination since they were first discovered more than 200 years ago. Generations of people have been fascinated by these creatures with little more to quench their thirst than mere skeletons of the past. Now, we’re poised to offer more, to take the next step. Besides, dinosaurs are awesome.

Matt Wein looks forward to the day when a dinosaur can be elected to Congress. E-mail him at mattwein@hotmail.com.