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Top Scientist Says We Are 5 Years Away From Dinosaurs Returning!
The scientist that is consulted for every Jurassic Park film has made an important announcement; we could be as little as 5 years away from dinosaurs making a comeback!
Palaeontologist, Dr. Jack Horner, who is the real-life inspiration for Jurassic Park’s dinosaur expert Dr Alan Grant, thinks that it should not be too long before we can engineer a real-life dinosaur genetically, successfully.
When he started working with Steven Spielberg, Horner believed that the most viable way to bring dinosaurs back to life was through tapping into ancient strands of genetic code.
However, DNA degrades over time which rules that option out. But, Horner states that the genetic engineering angle of the ‘Jurassic World’ plot gave him an idea, (I can see the lightbulb popping up over his head): What if the best way to produce a dinosaur is by reversing evolution?
Basically in layman’s terms: take a bird like a chicken, (which already holds the prehistoric genetic markers of its dino ancestors) and made adjustments to mutate the animal back to its prehistoric roots.
So this option is not only possible but according to Horner, half the work in creating the “Chickenusaurus” (wasn’t my choice but was Horner’s), is already in progress.
Horner explains:
Of course birds are dinosaurs, so we just need to fix them so they look a little more like a dinosaur.
(I mean, that’s a bit obvious…)
He also comments on the four major distinctions between birds and dinosaurs:
Dinosaurs had long tails, arms, and hands – and through evolution they’ve lost their tails, and their arms and hands have turned into wings. Additionally, their whole snout has changed from the velociraptor-look to the bird-like beak morphology.
Therefore, to change a bird back into a dinosaur, Horner is attempting to flick the correct genetic switches “in such a way that we will get these ancestral characteristics back.”
A group at Harvard and Yale “just recently, were able to transform the head of a bird back to actually reverse-engineer the bird’s snout back into a dinosaur-like snout.” This is what Horner calls a definitive “proof of concept.”
Horner is no working on retro-engineering the tail portion back into existence:
Basically what we do is we go into an embryo that’s just beginning to form, and use some genetic markers to sort of identify when certain genes turn on and when they turn off.
And by determining when certain genes turn on, we can sort of figure out how a tail begins to develop. And we want to fix that gene so it doesn’t stop the tail from growing.
We can make a bird with teeth, and we can change its mouth. And actually the wings and hands are not as difficult. We’re pretty sure we can do that soon.
The tail is the biggest project. But on the other hand, we have been able to do some things recently that have given us hope that it won’t take too long.
If they actually pull this off, can you imagine how insane and exciting this would be? I’m no expert but if Jack Horner thinks its possible then we might as well hope its possible! We might be experienceing our own Jurassic World! Maybe not in this next 5 years timeline but anything can happen.
Whilst we are talking about bringing things back from extinction, let’s hope this is successful as this article suggests that chocolate will be extinct in 2050! Check it out!