Deep in the Jurassic jungle, you come face-to-knee with the largest animal ever to walk the Earth. Rearing up on its hind legs, the sauropod towers above you, its long neck reaching for juicy leaves in the tall trees.

Two of these spectacular giants have just gone on show at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Their fossilised bones lay entombed in quarry rock in Wyoming for 150 million years. Scientists say they are just a foretaste of the wonders buried in the Jurassic MileA one-square-mile of ground in the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. Today it is hot and dry but during the Jurassic period it was wet and tropical. Flash floods killed and buried many dinosaurs leaving a rich deposit of remains..

From school sandpit to Hollywood blockbuster, there's no escaping our life-long love of these terrible lizards. It's a two-century-old obsession that began the day a 12-year-old girl discovered something monstrous in the cliffs at Lyme Regis.

Her name was Mary Anning, the year was 1811 and she had found an ichthyosaur - a marine reptile that lived over 90 million years ago. Anning became a world-famous fossil hunter and her finds were studied by geologist William Buckland. In 1824, he announced a sensational discovery: the megalosaurusWilliam Buckland is not the only scientist who claimed to be the first to discover dinosaurs. Two years earlier, Gideon Mantell found Iguanodon teeth, but Buckland claimed they belonged to a fish., the first identified dinosaur.

Since then, dino mania has inspired scientists to ask big questions about our planet's past and life on Earth. Dinosaurs have changed our understanding of how life evolves and how it goes extinct. For some, the next step is to bring them back to life.

To do so, scientists need DNA. In Jurassic Park, they discover the genetic code of dinosaurs locked away in mosquitoes preserved in amberFossilised resin - which is the viscous (thick, sticky) liquid inside a tree that protects it from external threats. Amber has been appreciated for its colour and natural beauty since Neolithic times.. But in the real world, the oldest DNA found so far is from a mammoth.

Palaeontologist Jack Horner thinks there's another way. "I have a lab where we are attempting to make a dinosaur." He hopes to reverse engineer them from their living descendants: birds. Geneticists think they can build a chickenosaurus with a long tail, teeth and even hands.

Others are less convinced. "Ethically messy, ecologically awkward, and really expensive." That's ecologist Douglas McCauley's take on the whole idea of de-extinctionAlso known as resurrection biology. The woolly mammoth is the most likely candidate for resurrection and existed as recently as 4,000 years ago.. Biologist Joseph Bennett says: "It's better to spend the money on the living than the dead." For him, conservation is far more critical than playing Dr FrankensteinIn Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein creates a living monster from dead body parts. with ancient DNA.

Still, there is so much we don't know about dinosaurs. How they hunted, raised their young, used colour and display to find mates and deter predators.

But dinosaur expert Steve Brusatte says it "would simply be cruel". The world was a different place 70 million years ago. "It would be like a human trying to make it on Venus."

Jurassic Park gave some dinosaurs like velociraptors a movie makeover. The cinematic star was scaly, as big as a horse and fiercely intelligent. The real thing was the size of a turkey and covered in feathers.

"It's important that people understand dinosaurs are still among us," says palaeontologist Mark Norell. "They're represented by at least 13,000 species alive today."

But maybe pigeons don't fire the imagination quite like a T.rex. Which is why people will keep dreaming of dinosaurs for many years to come.

Yes: These extraordinary animals compel us to dream big. Mary Anning could not imagine fossil hunters would unearth over 1,000 dinosaur species. Who knows what science will achieve in the future.

No: It's unlikely and is probably for the best. We are fascinated by their ghostly presence in the rock and the tragedy of their extinction. In the flesh, they would lose that mystery and magic.

Or... The question is dangerously misleading. There are 225 critically endangered birds in the world and we have lost over 150 species since 1500. We should protect the dinosaurs still among us.