For those who don't like the long lines of Six Flags Great America – a visit to "Jurassic World" might be the more thrilling alternative this summer.

The dino park first seen in the 1993 billion-dollar blockbuster and Michael Crichton best seller “Jurassic Park” is open to the public in the franchise’s fourth film starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, which smashes into theaters beginning tonight with advance screenings.

As is the norm for this franchise, things go terribly wrong, because a genetically altered mega-dinosaur is just one of the prehistoric predators that start feasting on the park attendees.

Actually, the long lines at Great America aren’t so bad after all.

If it all sounds far-fetched, it is – for the most part. There is some truth in the science behind the Jurassic Park franchise, according to Reed Scherer, a micropaleontology and biostratigraphy professor at Northern Illinois University, who has spent time studying fossils as small as algae and as big as dinosaurs.

Daily Chronicle reporter Adam Poulisse sat down with Scherer to discuss the science behind “Jurassic World” and its predecessors, and why Scherer would never visit a real-life dino theme park.

Poulisse: How realistic are the “Jurassic Park” movies?

Scherer: We’ve learned a whole lot about dinosaurs since the first movie came out. We know now they had downy feathers or large feathers because they are in the same lineage as birds. The original dinosaurs from “Jurassic Park” didn’t have anything remotely like that, and they could have made the dinosaurs [in “Jurassic World”] much more true to what we understand about dinosaurs now. I think they made an artistic decision to be consistent with the movie franchise than the science.

They also have a mosasaur in “Jurassic World,” which is not a dinosaur but a giant marine reptile which is twice the size of the real ones. And the velicoraptors in the movie were much bigger.

Poulisse: What did they get right?

Scherer: The biggest revelation of the first “Jurassic Park” movie in terms of educating the public about dinosaurs, is they’re not slow, dim-witted things that died out because they were too stupid to survive. They were metabolically active. They were not just big, but could move and had social behaviors the way many other animals have today. It was a very complex, interactive ecosystem the way we have now.

Poulisse: And the mosquitoes in the amber, and extracting dinosaur DNA from them, then using frogs to fill in the gaps? Is that accurate?

Scherer: It’s beyond what is possible with that material just because DNA is a fragile molecule. I suppose it’s theoretically possible with something like woolly mammoths. You can probably extract enough that you can reconstruct this animal, and we have living relatives that are close enough, with elephants, you can make that leap.

Their explanation for why the dinosaurs in “Jurassic World” don’t have feathers is because, in the original, they filled in the gaps of missing DNA with frog DNA, which totally doesn’t make sense. It would have made more sense to use chicken DNA.

Poulisse: Going back to 1993 when the first movie came out. I remember it being a huge hit and there were lines at all the movie theaters. What kind of impact did that have on the paleontology career field?

Scherer: What the movies provide was the experience I had growing up in [New York City] where we had a great dinosaur museum. Not everyone has that, but everyone’s got a movie theater. I think “Jurassic Park” exposed people all across, not just the country, but the world to dinosaurs to a way that they might not have had that opportunity. I think that in itself made a pretty lasting impact.

Poulisse: This movie takes a different direction because it shows the theme park in operation. What do you think about that concept? Would dinosaurs be able to live in this time?

Scherer: I could see it being technologically possible. Whether it’s a good thing to do, for a variety of reasons, gets to the ethics. Reconstructing extinct creatures is awfully cool, definitely cooler than having something that’s alive rather than a robot. Even if it’s a perfect robot, they know it’s a robot. Rather than reconstruct DNA, if you had a time machine and could bring back a stegosaurus, it’s still going to have a hard time because the vegetation is changed. It would have to adapt to live in the world that it evolved to live in.

Poulisse: If there was a real Jurassic World theme park, it would probably generate huge business though.

Scherer: I do have to question the economics of it, and what it would cost. Think how expensive it is just go to Disney. I haven’t obviously seen the movie yet, but I would have to question that it could be an economic success, because everyone would have to have known what happened in [the first movie]. I don’t really think it would get enough visitors to get make money.

Poulisse: Would you visit a real Jurassic World?

Scherer: If I was invited. I don’t think I’d spend money to do it. As a kid, I never had much interest going to Disney parks or any theme parks at all. I have always gravitated toward what’s the real, natural world than something that’s manufactured for my entertainment.