17) Bringing Dinosaurs back to life with evo devo from Jack Horner and Hans Larsson (by Theodor Zbinden)

Jack Horner is a paleontology professor at the Montana State University and also a curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.  Horner is one of the best known American paleontologists and one of his most prominent discoveries is the fact that Dinosaur cared for their young.  He named various new dinosaur species and two are named after him; Achelousaurus horneri and Anasazisaurus horneri.  He also was the technical advisor for all of the Jurassic Park films.  In 2009 Horner published a book named How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to be forever.  With the help of Evo devo, Horner planes to revive dinosaur from chicken embryos.  An additional discovery of Horner is that chicken have evolved from dinosaur.  He would like to turn the evolutionary clock backward, but this can be done just because today exist the knowledge of the evolution of the fossil record and the developmental pattern of modern animals.  Evo devo is the only scientific field that connects evolution with development.  Horner thinks that the genes used in the dinosaur are still present in the chicken but they are not active, now the key is how to activate or regulate them again.  He thinks that it is not necessary a whole new suite of genes, it is just needed to adjust the existing genes in activating some and deactivating others.  Chicken and Dinosaur have a very similar skeleton, the difference between them should be eliminated just by adjustments of gene acting in the basic body plane.  If we take, as an example the disappearance of the tail, dinosaur had one but chicken don’t.  We can ask ourselves how the tail disappeared or we can ask ourselves what we can do to reappear the tail again.  Or we may ask ourselves, what can we do to recreate at onec the whole dinosaur from a chicken embryo.  Currently there are birds species that have a tail like structure, and the surprising thing is that in the early developmental stages of the chicken embryo a tail is starting to growth.  But some molecular signals cause to stop that growing.  If it is possible to find out what factors are implying the stopping of the tail growth, it should be possible to inhibit these factors to led growth the tail.  The tail example is just one aspect of growing a dinosaur out of a chicken.  But it shows how it could be done for the entire animal.  For other organs like the teeth’s the knowledge already exists of how they grow in other species .  The idea of growing a dinosaur from a chicken embryo would be to inject different growth factors into a chicken embryo at different stages during the development.  The researcher would play the role of a conductor of an orchestra, activating and deactivating genes producing a dinosaur with activating and deactivating dormant chicken genes with the help of the evo devo knowledge.  So, maybe in the near future Horner and his will be able to create a chicken-dinosaur like animal with the help of the evo devo scientific knowledge.

Jurassic World' Scientist: We Can Bring Dinosaurs Back to Life With...Chickens!

Reference:

1. Citing webpage. Builing a dinosaur from a chicken. Retrieved Aplil 8, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVXdEOiCw8
2. Jack Horner, James Gorman.  Jack Horner's plan to bring Dinosaurs back to life. Discovery, the magazin of science, technology, and the future. Issue, April 2009.