Top scientist claims we are 5 years away from bringing back dinosaurs
Scientist Dr. Jack Horner, made a huge and terrifying announcement this week - that in just 5 years we could see dinosaurs making a comeback. What could possibly go wrong?!
Dr Horner who’s been a consultant on all four Jurassic Park films says we aren't far off from successfully genetically engineering a real life dinosaur. When Dr Horner first began his research, it was believed that the most viable way to bring dinosaurs back was through ancient strands of genetic code. However, scientists have since discovered that DNA degrades over time, and genetic engineering is now the way to go. That's why we saw the recent Jurassic World pushing the genetic engineering angle as opposed to the first movie that was geared towards dino DNA. I did love that clip in the movie though. Check it out:
Scientists are now looking at reverse evolution. For example, scientists could take a chicken, a bird that already has prehistoric genetic markers of it's dinosaur ancestors, and tweak it and mutate it back to it's prehistoric roots. Dr Horner says this is totally possible, and claims he is already halfway to creating the “Chickenosaurus”. Dr Horner says:
Of course birds are dinosaurs, so we just need to fix them so they look a little more like a dinosaur. 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.
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
That kind of talk is going to get us into a lot of trouble Mr. There are literally four movies that show you why this is a bad idea! Although it might not be a bad thing to knock humans off the top of the food chain. We're far too arrogant. We need taking down a peg or two.
