This May Not End Well Either

A self-taught maverick paleontologist thinks he's figured out how to reverse-engineer a dinosaur from a chicken. And he's the guy who told Michael Crichton how geneticists would recreate dinosaurs, a key feature in Crichton's book Jurassic Park.

Jack Horner (who's not at all little) works at the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University. His understanding of dinosaurs underlies much of our modern view of them -- herd animals, not necessarily cold-blooded and more like a modern bird than a modern crocodile. He had the idea of dinosaur DNA preserved when insects that dined on dino blood died and were preserved in amber, which Crichton used in his book and Steven Spielberg adapted for the movie version. Horner now says that DNA would have broken down too much for the kind of cloning seen in Jurassic Park to work.

But if you take the DNA of one of the dinosaur's modern descendants -- like a chicken -- and reverse-engineered it to remove the stuff time added to it to make a chicken, then you could have a real dinosaur, something Horner calls a "chickenosaurus." Not being a biologist, Horner's never tried this and isn't sure he'd know how to go about it, which is why he's advertised for a biologist to work with him on the project. He's pretty sure it could be done by reworking the chicken DNA to unfuse the "fingers" found in its wings to the real grasping digits of a dinosaur and put teeth back in its mouth.

Every living thing shares a lot of DNA with every other living thing, some more than others. Sometimes those old DNA features crop up, even in people, leading to conditions called "atavisms." So you can have babies born with vestigial tails. Thus the chicken has a dinosaur inside, waiting for some modern scientist like Jack Horner to stick in his thumb and pull out the plum of a gen-you-wine thunder lizard. Since this effort would not actually clone some ancient species of dinosaur, like the fictional Jurassic Park did, starting out with a chicken would mean you wound up with a chicken-sized animal. And since the experiment would only alter the development of the animal as an embryo rather than its genetic code, its own offspring would still be chickens. Probably.

However, article writer Thomas Hayden drops one little unsettling note in the story as he explains how modern animals give birth only to modern animals, even though they share DNA with their genetic ancestors: "Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves."

That could really mess up Thanksgiving.