Embedded Files
Book written by Jack Horner in collaboration with the Smithsonian Museum
Jack Horner, the scientist who worked with Steven Spielberg on the movie Jurassic Park believes he has found a way to alter a gene to make a dinosaur hatch from a chicken egg.
In the 1980s, Horner began using CAT scans to look inside fossilized dinosaur eggs. At North Carolina State University, Mary Schweitzer has extracted fossil molecules---proteins that survived 68 million years---from a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil excavated by Horner. These proteins show that T. rex and the modern chicken are cousins. At McGill University, Hans Larsson is manipulating a chicken embryo to awaken the dinosaur within---starting by getting it to grow a tail and eventually prompting it to grow the distinct limbs of a dinosaur.
All of this is happening by changing a single gene. This incredible research is leading to discoveries and applications so unbelievable they're scary.
Quotes:
"Based on our research, dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies, cared for their young, brought food to their colonies, and traveled on huge groups." - This quotes shows that dinosaurs were very social animals and were highly evolved when it came to their minds.
"We are able to drill into the dinosaur bone and extract some viable hemoglobin, we then used this to determine the age and sex of the dinosaur" This shows that even after 60 million years, there is still some genetic tissue that can be harvested from the dinosaur skeletons.
"Another similarity is the medullary tissue that is inside the bone of both dinosaurs and birds today, this tissue is where excess calcium is stored during a birds pregnancy" This is yet another character that linked both dinosaurs and modern day birds.
" We were able to find soft tissue (blood vessels) in the bone of the dinosaur that contained traces of viable proteins" These proteins could then be used to produce DNA which could be spliced into a chicken egg to (in theory) grow a dinosaur.
I believe that this project is 100 percent possible in the future as our technology evolves to be able to make DNA with less and less starting tissue. The Jack Horner Project is still being worked on and continued every day as the new technology has come out for us to do gene editing on a chicken embryo so that it doesn't loose its tail after the embryo stage, each one of these traits that we can "edit out" will bring us one step closer to a dinosaur.
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