14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, esteemed Montana State University researcher Jack Horner, who also happens to be the Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, made an appearance in a Talks at Google presentation and detailed his plans to genetically-engineer a chickenosaurus.
How does one make a chickenosaurus? Well, it's pretty basic stuff if you know your away around that one very special molecule that carries and encodes the genetic instructions all living organisms need to develop and function. Yup, we're talking about good old DNA.
Here's how it goes: to make a chickenosaurus, you take a bird and alter its genetic makeup just enough to have it grow a tail, a scary-looking snout, maybe even reptile-like skin, and a full set of fangs. Plainly put, Jack Horner wants to develop dinosaur-traits in birds, poultry included.
Trying to clone dinosaurs is so last year
There is this widespread misconception that the only way to bring back dinosaurs would be to find and extract a sample of DNA belonging to one such ancient beast - maybe more, if we get really lucky - and use it to clone ourselves a brand new prehistoric monster.
The trouble is that DNA has this annoying habit of breaking down in time, and so this scenario is pretty much a utopia, paleontologist Jack Horner explains. We haven't even managed to recover intact DNA from woolly mammoth corpses and they're only millennia old, so how are we to achieve this with dinosaur fossils that are millions of years old?
“I have tried many times to extract DNA from dinosaurs and we will always fail - it’s probably a good thing because the DNA molecule is huge and it’s just not very stable,” the Montana State University specialist explains in his Talks at Google interview.
Well then, why don't we try genetic engineering?
They don't look anything like the vicious beasts that once roamed our planet, but the fact of the matter is that birds are the descendants of long-gone dinosaurs. What this means is that their genetic code is not very different to that of the ancient creatures we so desperately want to bring back.
To turn chickens into dinosaurs, scientist Jack Horner proposes that we identify what he calls dormant dinosaur genes in their genetic code and switch them on while they are still embryos. When they emerge from their eggs, the birds should display dinosaur traits.
“We're going into an embryo and determining at what stage of their development particular genes are turned on and when they're turned off and trying to adjust those to get a bird to hatch out with a long tail,” the researcher explains. It sounds like a pretty straightforward plan, doesn't it?
This wacky project might actually succeed
It might seem that Jack Horner is just talking nonsense, but as surprising as this may sound, his plan to genetically-engineer a chickenosaurus might actually prove fruitful. Mind you, experiments like the one he has in mind, albeit not quite as ambitious and bizarre, have already been carried out.
Back in the 1990s, scientists at the University of Wisconsin tricked chickens into growing teeth. Then, just a few weeks ago, one other team of researchers announced their success in growing Velociraptor snouts on chicks. Might as well throw in a tail and a set of limbs and make a complete dinosaur.
True, one such creature would not be a dinosaur per se, but a hybrid. Then again, Jack Horney insists that, seeing how getting intact dinosaur DNA for cloning experiments is out of the question, this is about as close as we can ever hope to get to having prehistoric monsters populate our planet once more.
If you have some time to spare, here's the paleontologist's Talks at Google interview in full. Do enjoy!
