Dino Evo Devo

The first time I watched Jurrasic Park, I remember thinking, "That would be so cool if it were real!" Many years later, I now think it would be fairly terrifying. But still pretty cool.

It seems that all my dino dreams could come true. This article on Macleans.ca discusses how Paleontologist Jack Horner is working to bring dinosaurs to life:

"If it sounds straight out of Jurassic Park, it’s no coincidence: Horner served as scientific advisor on all three films, and is said to be an inspiration for the rugged protagonist, Alan Grant. Unlike in the movie, though, Horner thinks he can bring back a dinosaur without using its DNA—a crucial difference, because in real life, dino DNA hasn’t been recovered. Horner has a different plan. By making a few genetic tweaks to its modern- day ancestor, the bird, he wants to hatch a dinosaur straight from a chicken egg."

"It’s Horner’s vision, and McGill University paleontologist Hans Larsson is working to make it happen. With Horner’s encouragement, Larsson is experimenting with chicken embryos to create the creature Horner describes: a “chickenosaurus,” they call it. If he succeeds, Larsson will have made an animal with clawed hands, teeth, a long, dinosaurian tail and ancestral plumage, one that shares characteristics with “the dinosaur we know that’s closest to birds, little raptors like the velociraptor,” Horner says."

Chickenosaurus?

Our new dino pal will be made possible by a relatively new field of science called Evolutionary Developmental Biology, or "Evo Devo" to folks in the know. Evo Devo is the study of how changes in the development of an organism can result in different end products. By turning genes on or off at different times or for different lengths of time, you get a different final organism. In this project, scientists are trying to alter the development of a chicken to get it to turn out very similar to a dinosaur. Because chickens are descendants of dinosaurs, and therefore are very genetically similar, it's a matter of taking the genes that are already there and utilizing them in a different way.

It's an exercise in evolution. As Horner puts it: "The chickenosaurus will be a conversation piece," he says, sparking a public debate about evolution by winding its tape backwards for all to see. “Let’s put it this way,” Horner says. “You can’t make a dinosaur out of a chicken, if evolution doesn’t work.”