More than 20 years ago, the movie Jurassic Park came out, based off a novel of the same name written by Michael Crichton. It followed the idea that dinosaurs could be recreated by obtaining their DNA from prehistoric mosquitoes preserved in amber. While no dinosaur DNA have been so far harvested from this method, it may still be possible for dinosaurs to roam this earth through what Jack Horner calls the "chickenosaurus."
Horner proposed the idea of re-creating small dinosaurs through the reactivation of ancient DNA sleeping deep within chickens back in 2009 with his book How to Build a Dinosaur. He revisited the topic in a TED talk in 2011 but has since then gone quiet. As it turns out, quiet is not the same as idle.
In all those years, Horner has been working with a team, exploring evolutionary development. His work has been progressing steadily, resulting in some of the first breakthroughs about how tails develop in the embryo. Building upon what molecular biologists have learned about modern bird genes, Horner hopes to unlock the secrets of evolution to give birth to the chickenosaurus.
Are chickens really the best candidates for recreating dinosaurs?
There are actually other birds that are more similar in structure to dinosaurs, what with unchanged physicalities and extremities reminiscent of the inhabitants of Jurassic Park. However, these birds are more difficult to work with in a lab setting. Chickens, on the other hand, are highly domesticated and can easily be cared for at low cost. There are also decades worth of research on their anatomy and genome which will take away some of the work for Horner's team.
To come even remotely close to recreating a dinosaur, Horner said that his team has three engineering tasks to accomplish: make a long tail, create arms with claws and fingers instead of wings, and develop a toothed but beakless head.
Preliminary work has already been done by Matthew Harris from the Harvard Medical School, creating a toothy snout by expressing ancient genes for crocodile-like teeth in chicken embryos. Horner will be building upon Harris' research, pointing out that the biggest challenge is the creation of a tail for the chickenosaurus.
"Our next step really is now to get ourselves a colony of [geckos] and then see if we can take some of these pathways and actually see if we can knock out the tail. We're pretty sure that the tail genes we've discovered in mice will work here," explained Horner.
At the rate he's going, Horner expects significant results in just five years. George Lucas is a major supporter of Horner's work with the chickenosaurus.
