tyrannoraptora:

crownedrose:

How to Hatch a Dinosaur
Get a chicken, hijack its DNA, and stand back.
Photo: Dan Forbes; model maker: Jason Clay Lewis.

People have told Jack Horner he’s crazy before, but he has always turned out to be right. In 1982, on the strength of seven years of undergraduate study, a stint in the Marines, and a gig as a paleontology researcher at Princeton, Horner got a job at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. He was hired as a curator but soon told his bosses that he wanted to teach paleontology. “They said it wasn’t going to happen,” Horner recalls. Four years and a MacArthur genius grant later, “they told me to do whatever I wanted to.” Horner, 65, continues to work at the museum, now filled with his discoveries. He still doesn’t have a college degree.

“What we’re trying to do is take our chicken, modify it, and make a chickensaurus.”

When he was a kid in the 1950s, dinosaurs were thought to have been mostly cold, solitary, reptilian beasts—true monsters. Horner didn’t agree with this picture. He saw in their hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old skeletons hints of sociability, of animals that lived in herds, unlike modern reptiles. Then, in the 1970s, Horner and his friend Bob Makela excavated one of the most spectacular dinosaur finds ever—a massive communal nesting site of duck-billed dinosaurs in northwest Montana complete with fossilized adults, juveniles, and eggs. There they found proof of crazy idea number one: The parents at the site cared for their young. Judging by their skeletons, the baby duckbills would have been too feeble to forage on their own.

Horner went on to find evidence suggesting that, once hatched, the animals were fast-growing (crazy idea number two) and possibly warm-blooded (that would be three), and he continues to be at the forefront of the search for ancient bits of organic matter surviving intact in fossils (number four). Add in his work as a technical consultant on the Jurassic Park movies and Horner has probably done more to shape the way we currently think about dinosaurs than any other living paleontologist.

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I decided to repost this article for anyone interested in the whole “chickenosaurus” topic. After alchymista posted a poster about chickenosaurus (or chickensaurus), I thought I’d post the Wired article again and talk a little bit about the whole topic.

I think it’s a very cool idea. It’s one way of going down a Jurassic Park-esque route. Being that I’ve been following the palaeontology world ever since I was a toddler (especially the relation to modern birds), the thought of almost de-evolving (totally a word now) a chicken is really interesting. I love genetics, I love biology, I love dinosaurs, and this is right up my alley. Frankly, right now all I can think of to say is, “THIS IS AWESOME!” Not really too detailed, right? I suggest reading the full article on Wired to see more photos and read all about the process they’re trying to overthrow. Hijacking DNA; just that on its own sounds awesome.

Horner also has a book out, which is called, “How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution”. Definitely an interesting read for anyone curious.

I love the idea, but the paranoid side of me just knows great leaps in genetic engineering will lead to military involvement. (Yep, too much X-Files, I know, I know).

I’ve read everything there is to do with this idea, but in case you haven’t heard…

tagged as Jack Horner. dinosaurs. experiments. palaeontology. research. evolution.

via tyrannoraptora

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  7. drainbow reblogged this from crownedrose and added:
    I hope to god this will happen in my lifetime
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  16. volkspirate-jim reblogged this from tyrannoraptora and added:
    EVERYBODY HERE NEEDS TO SEE THE T.E.D TALK THAT HORNER DID! (caplock shouting here)...
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  21. milodrums reblogged this from allinthebones and added:
    did you read CHICKEN GEORGE
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