[vampyregirl]

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at McGill University in Montreal, says he plans to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.
Larsson believes that by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryos development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy.
Though still in its infancy the research could eventually lead to hatching live prehistoric creatures and demonstrate once and for all that birds are descendants of dinosaurs.
The research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs program and National Geographic.
Larsson says the idea for the project came about during discussions with noted American paleontologist Jack Horner, who served as technical advisor for the Jurassic park films.

[eastbay]

I can't wait....


But this project better get a move on, there may be ....uh.... 'funding issues' as time marches on.

[ian807]

And them tyrannosaurs are gooood eatin'!

[Carlhole]

Since crows are very intelligent, there would be nothing stopping us from enhancing that feature thereby making them into great pets. People like colorful snakes and iguanas, don't they? Why wouldn't they like some highly artificially-bred genotype-extraction that looks like a dinosaur, maybe even with a few feathers?

I know, I'd want one!

[TheDude]

AFP: Canadian scientist aims to turn chickens into dinosaurs



Pure excitement.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Great, just what we need, raptor chickens ten feet tall. Dinochickens. They'll get out and start eating all the Canadians.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'G')reat, just what we need, raptor chickens ten feet tall. Dinochickens. They'll get out and start eating all the Canadians.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', 'T')hey don't have to be huge and violent. They could be designed to act more like Tribbles.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'J')ust how much control does a Canadian scientist have? As the Jurassic Park movies pointed out, things don't always go as planned. Which genetic switch do they tinker with? Maybe they hit the wrong switch and wind up with a pterodactyl.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', '
')
You know... something cute, fun, cuddly and a little bit of a smart-ass once and a while.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', 'Y')ou know... something cute, fun, cuddly and a little bit of a smart-ass once and a while.

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'W')ho would buy a hugely expensive genetically engineered dinosaur that looks like a hamster. Why not just get a hamster?

[Carlhole]

The quest to build a dinosaur

Scientists are working to bring dinosaurs back to life. They think they’re getting close.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')t’s a driving idea behind evolutionary developmental biology, or “evo devo” for short. A relatively new field of science, evo devo was sparked by the startling discovery that most creatures share many of the same genes. Homeobox genes (or Hox genes), which flick on during development and govern which body parts go where, were first found in fruit flies in the 1980s, says Sean Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Experiments to find Hox genes were straight out of a horror movie: scientists created insects with legs where their mouths should be.)

After pinpointing these master genes, researchers “looked around the animal kingdom, and were stunned and delighted to find them everywhere,” Carroll says. Indeed, we’ve got more in common with other species than most people realize. The DNA of a person and a chimpanzee, for example, are about 99 per cent identical—meaning that, in the six million years of evolution that divide us, less than one per cent of the three billion letters in the human genome have changed. Even the sea squirt, a tube-shaped creature that clings to underwater piers, shares about 80 per cent of our genes. “If you take snakes, frogs and birds, you’re really taking the same genes and using them in different ways,” Carroll says. Not only do we share genes with other animals; we share them with distant ancestors, too. Despite evolutionary change, many of our genes have been around for more than 500 million years, Carroll says.

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'J')ames Carville at a costume Ball. Dressed up as Joan Rivers

[EnergyUnlimited]

They won't recreate dinosaurs.
It is only fantasy.

Many "dinosaur" genes in current birds are either gone for good or got damaged by random mutations beyond recovery.
They won't have necessary information to "restore" those mutated, damaged genes to their former chemical structure (nucleotide order) and they will not have any means whatsoever to reclaim some genes which are already lost for good.
To get there, they would need preserved DNA from dinosaurs and they don't have it.
However it is perhaps possible to produce some mutant bird which might resemble dinosaur to some degree.
That is all, what they may hope for.

On the other hand bringing back to life saber tooth tigers, mammoth or a dodo is not an impossible task.

[crude_intentions]

This is impossible everyone knows that God created birds and dinosaurs separately. So there can be no "leftover" Dinosaur DNA inside these birds. Unless of course god put that DNA thier to test or faith Or maybe satan put it their to trick us.

Personally I think these guys should put thier efforts into pursuing more noble and useful goals such as creating politicians with more than half a brain.

[Carlhole]

If you actually read the article, the scientist is saying that any species genome can be "peeled back", as it were, to reveal earlier genomic stages in that species evolution.

Since birds were (most probably) an offshoot of a larger group (dinosaurs), some genomic attributes of all dinosaurs can be discovered by peeling back the genomes of birds. This doesn't mean that you would get a complete dinosaur genome, just whatever the bird genome was able to record during its evolutionary path.

If you then bring to physical expression those long dormant gene sequences, then you would "dinosaurify" the bird genome.

However, birds will not have recorded ALL of the genomic expressions of all species of dinosaurs.

[Serial_Worrier]

Fantastic, more chicken breast meat! Now if we can only make sure they don't escape the farm.... Eee-I-Eee-I-O!!!!

This will keep KFC well supplied for those Double-Down sandwiches. Finger lickin' good! Hee-haw!