Rebirth of a dream
Scientists said they can reconstruct living dinosaurs within 5 years
Ariel Finerman, Habr, based on Sci-Tech Universe: Scientists Say They Can Recreate Living Dinosaurs Within the Next 5 Years
Dinosaurs may soon return to real life, because the paleontologist who inspired Michael Crichton to shoot the original film "Jurassic Park" has announced a research project to bring extinct creatures back to life.
Doctor Jack Horner says that scientists only need 5-10 years to reconstruct living dinosaurs (in 2012 he planned to create kurosaurs in 5 years – VM).
Horner is working with scientists from Harvard and Yale, looking for the closest living relatives of dinosaurs in the hope of changing them. "Of course, birds are dinosaurs," Horner said. "So we just need to change them to look like dinosaurs."
Horner and his group will start with a modern chicken, recognized as a direct descendant of the massive lizards that once ruled the Earth. Horner advised all four Jurassic Park films. In a behind-the-scenes interview from the first film, writer Michael Crichton admitted that his hero, Dr. Alan Grant, was a mixture of Horner and Philip J. Kerry.
The 71-year–old paleontologist said that when he first started working on the films, he believed that dinosaurs would be brought back in the same way as in the film - through preserved pieces of their DNA taken from fossils. However, over the past time, he and his colleagues have become more aware of how DNA is destroyed, and decided that this is not the way they need to go.
According to Horner, chicken and many other modern birds have many genes in common with dinosaurs. He believes they will be able to manipulate them to reverse the evolutionary process – initiating changes that will express more and more ancient characteristics.
"Dinosaurs had long tails, limbs and hands – and as a result of evolution, they lost their tails, and limbs and hands turned into wings," Horner explained to reporters. "In addition, the whole morphology of their mouth has changed from the shape of a velociraptor to a bird's beak." Horner believes that his work will determine a way to flip the gene switch "in such a way that we return these hereditary characteristics."
Horner called the 2015 study (A molecular mechanism for the origin of a key evolutionary innovation, the bird beak and palate, revealed by an integrative approach to major transitions in vertical history) a confirmation of his idea, noting that scientists from Harvard and Yale were able to turn a bird's head into a dinosaur's snout.
"In fact, we use the embryo, which is just beginning to form, and we use some genetic markers to identify when the right genes are turned on and off," he said. "And by determining when the right genes are turned on, we can figure out how the tail begins to develop. And we want to fix these genes so that they don't interfere with the tail growing."
Horner is sure that some form of a lizard, named by him "kurosaurus", will walk the earth in 10 years. "We can grow a bird with teeth, and we can change its mouth," he said. "In fact, the wings and brushes are not so complicated. We are confident that we will be able to do this in the near future."
The project, however, is not an easy task, and Horner noted that "the tail is the biggest problem. But on the other hand, recently we were able to do some things that gave us hope that it wouldn't take too long."
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