Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He’s found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he’s taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a “Chickenosaurus”.
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… He’s making the CROCODUCK. Fundies will have no choice but to sit down and shut up! (one can hope)
What I would find really intriguing is if we could find fossil DNA for some trait (the big teeth of the Smilodon, for instance) and GM them into a living, related species (in this case, lions). It would not be a bona fide “bringing back dead species” but it would make it possible to draw conclusions of how those animals functioned, rather than just speculate about it.
And when speaking of reconstructions; most mammals only have two sets of colour-sensitive eye cells (primates have three). But I recall some lab mice were re-engineered to have three sets of colour-sensitive cells.
If we could repeat the feat with dogs, it could pave the way for trained dogs using more visual input to help disabled people, dogs have both poor colour vision and poor eyesight.
Do this, and the resistance to GM organisms will dwindle.
Please do not give the dog human genes!!!!
Building a dinosaur from a chicken? I bet that was hard since dinosaurs were REPTILES and chickens were not. Besides chickens and dinosaurs existed at the same time just like all other humans and animals. At least that’s what Biblical history teaches.
In any regard, building a dinosaur from a human turd would be just as easy and given the right computer program it works the same way.
Maybe chickensaurus Rex will be built in time for us to use against the fascist flotilla to Israel. Perhaps Chickensaurus Rex can run all the illegal palestinians (Canaanites) out of the Holy Land and end the Palestinian occupation of Israel.
This would work for the benefit of humanity. Getting rid of a terrorists organization (hamas) and inventing a new animals for PETA to cry for while yet inventing another item to laugh at liberals about. I say we “move forward” (whatever liberals mean by that daily used term) with chickensaurus Rex. If anything, we could cut global warming in half by feeding liberals to it for lunch and obtaining Ted Turner’s population control goal. I say we feed Turner and Soros to it first. If it dies, we can always make another.
This will still leave a fundamental question unanswered: Did dinosaurs taste like chicken?
Rumple, I seriously hope you’re kidding/trolling because dinosaurs were definitely not reptiles.
Taylor, Rumple is definitely trolling, but I suspect he might be dumb enough to believe what he wrote. I’d still love to see a chickensaurus rex though.
Taylor, dinosaurs were reptiles by some definitions; trouble is, by the same definition so are chickens.
I for once would be happy with Smilodon features in a house cat, you’d end up with a 20 lbs cat with 2″ teeth. Nasty surprise for the local coyote and bobcat population.
This is the problem with cladistics. Cladists think they are forcing the masses towards a greater truth when they insist on certain roots as the defining label for a group instead of others, (i.e., calling chickens a form of dinosaur, which is both what they say and true) but are rather blind sided when they realize that kittens are a form of mushroom.
Here, a cladist would say to Horner: “You can’t turn a chicken into a dinosaur because a chicken is a dinosaur” thus ignoring what Horner’s point it. In my view, as a person who thinks cladistic is the ONLY approach to working out phylogenetic relationships but a BAD approach for classification once you’ve got the tree drawn, a chickin is a bird and a T rex is a dinosaur. Paraphyly is acceptable in old taxa. A pronghorn is in the group of animals that includes bison and whales are not, even though a whale is a form of pronghorn. People who study grassland ecology and mammalian grazers do not study hump backed whales.
There are qualitative differences between things that emerged from within clades that argue for naming them. And, the cladistic nesting is NOT the way to derive those names. Otherwise, there are hooved animals that are whales AND animals with hooves that must be CALLED whales.
This would be very cool, but probably science fiction for now. I think I’ve heard of birds growing teeth before, under abnormal circumstances, and many birds actually still retain claws on their hands. (Chickens have one on each wing, but it’s completely useless. It’s obvious if you look closely the next time you’re enjoying a plate of hot wings.) Some of these claws are fairly large, and some are even still functional. Tails might be the easiest part; all birds have tails, with musculature specific to controlling the tailplane formed by their tail feathers. Getting a long tail is just matter of growing more vertebrae, and that happens enough in humans to know it could happen in birds too.
I doubt it could really be done, but the exercise would be fascinating and useful in understanding what different portions of DNA do, and how it behaves when genes get switched on at different times.
I don’t really see the point of this.* Unless all the genes that were originally present to make the dinosaur still exist in the chicken in some form that can be reactivated (or we find some other way of restoring the necessary genes) then what you produce would be at best a dinosaur-like creature. I don’t understand what that tells you about dinosaurs as they once existed. It’s like harnessing a couple of horses up to a Geo Metro and thinking it tells you something about what old fashioned hansome cabs were like.
* – Apart from the fact that dinosaurs rules.
Rory, that may be true, but the chicken is more like a dinosaur with genes turned off than a car is like a carriage. If you look in the trunk of a chicken for the spare tire, it may well be a wagon wheel.
…. this analogy is straining under the weight …
Also, dinosaurs are probably a lot more like chickens than we tend to think. There was a big huge but not well known group of dinosaurs that used feathers as their standard body cover/armor/insulation, and birds arose from and lived along side this group for a very long time.
So, you could possibly take a chicken genome, mess with it a bit, and get an actual dinosaur that while it never existed in that form exactly, would be much more a real dinosaur than a living thing bred to resemble a dinosaur. Maybe.
And it would be cool. And small, so it would be manageable. Unless of course it got big then we’re all in trouble.
Unless the social gene got accidentally turned on too and they decided to gang up on us.
Consider too that, from a chicken’s point of view, we have a lot to answer for! (he said after having eggs for lunch)
Have to admit as well that my first thought on seeing the headline was, what a concept for a really bad movie!
Well, Greg, I guess that’s my question: is it a dinosaur just because it looks and acts like a dinosaur? If we accept a genetic basis of species, can we claim that what we’ve made is a dinosaur if we don’t know what an actual dinosaur genome looks like?
And yes, this is absolutely a Sci-Fi movie of the week waiting to happen. Jurassic Pok-pok-p-kok (say it like a chicken clucking).
I once read that the average dinosaur size was about that of a medium-sized dog – no idea where the stats for that statement came from, but if it’s true, then reactivating the “dinosaur DNA” probably won’t result in an albertosaurus.
Boy, do I hate being right all the time!
Yeah, but the average size dog in those days was ….
I recall reading of an experiment where mouse inducer tissue inserted in a developing chick embryo jaw and induced the formation of tooth anlagen, which suggests that the tooth genes are still there.
Greg, I have published taxonomic papers based on cladistic analysis. But clearly I still have a lot to learn, because I could not make sense out of what you had to say about cladistics.
Jim, what I’m saying is this: As we work our way backwards from living species (or any set of them) we find that they all have common ancestors. Therefore, any set of living species can be thought of as being members of a clade that includes that set of living species (this part is self evident).
Sometimes, the traditional classifications are in conflict with this cladistic classification. For instance, the traditional category of “deer and antelopes” if all inclusive of deer, antelopes, including pronghorns and cheverotains, includes whales.
If you want whales to be in a separate category from things with feet, then you need to break the larger clade into small categories, which means that “deer and antelope” has to disappear and can not be used as a category. That’s perfectly fine as far as the phylogenetics goes, but does not make sense in more practical and pragmatic ways.
That is not the point: It simply underscores the difficulty that can happen when a purely cladistic approach creates the categorical label.
The problem is not that (some) cladists tell us that we can NOT use a particular label … rather, it is when we are told that we MUST use a particular lablel . For instance, the terms “old world monkey, new world monkey, and ape” are no longer consdidered valid by cladists, because OWMs and Apes form a monophyletic group, but mokeys with apes excluded does not.
The solution to this, from a purely cladistic point of view, is to group OWMs and NWMs, which is not helpful because they are actually separately monophyletic and many of their common traits are probably convergences anyway; and to call apes monkeys, which is not helpful because all OWMs have the same exact set of traits that distinguishes them from apes on the basis of the same exact set of contrasts, and this set of differences includes a number of fundemental functional evolutionary differences. Being forced to fail to distinguish between a monkey and an ape is the same level of silliness as being forced fail to distinguish between a whale and a white tailed deer, or a kitten and a mushroom.
Let me put it another way: I personally accept the idea that a valid and distinct biological category can be erected that includes a single common ancestor that is currently held to be distinct at any medium to higher level traditional classification, and I’m willing to accept that some biological categories can be partly gutted by removal of a subset of organisms that are internally similar but distinct from the larger group.
This leads me to go to bed at night knowing that the “correct” definition of “fish” is does not include the fact that some of them lactate, and the “correct” definition of “hooved animal” does not have to include that some of them have fins and no legs.
As an ichthyologist, it was hard for me to accept that there is no such thing as fish. When I explained to a colleague that we were, in fact, osteichthyes, she replied, “That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard!”
I don’t have any problem with the idea that there is a clade of OWM which is the sister group of the clade of NWM + Apes. “Monkey” then, is a common language grade level term for OWM and NWM, and even, in some usages includes apes. When a child at the zoo exclaims about monkeys, it is OK with me so long as they are not antelopes or tigers. 🙂
I see I have proposed a new phylogenetic hypothesis for the primates. Well, what does an ichthyologist know about primate phylogeny anyhow?
@Taylor
The T.REx was a damned reptile. Get over it. Most were reptiles. Of course there were some like triceratops that were more like cows than reptiles, but a good many were reptiles. No different than crocodiles or komodo dragons or any other such create that existed then and now. Dinosaus did not have feathers no matter what some egomaniac dickhead in a museum says. Velociraptor DID NOT have fucking feathers you morons! What is percieved to be feathers were flaps of dried skin that in commonplace in REPTILES when their flesh is deterorating! Any have drugged whoe on the street is smarter than some college professors and self proclaimed know-it-all experts. Gee wiz.
The feathers thing is just a pathetic useless brain dead attempt to try one more desperate time to get people to belive in the satanic inspired idea of evolution. Get over. people do not believe it. Now, get out of your mother’s basement, get a hobby, and stop whining about your precious flying lizards with chicken feathers and human dicks. The next thing we hea r will be self proclaimed experts telling us that dinosaurs were the first ones on the moon and that they found evidence that T.Rex had a natural rocket biult in his ass to lift him off the ground and once lifted off, he could use his featehrs to further his flight to the moon. We all know that’s where chese comes from. It is a scientific fact that dinosaurs ate cheese off the moon becuase darwein said so.
Get a life people and stop trying to screw up the world. If you want to help the world, ban liberalism.
Liberalism – a thorn in the ass of normal people since 1965. That should be the democrat theme for 2012.
“Any have drugged whoe on the street is smarter than some college professors and self proclaimed know-it-all experts. Gee wiz.”
Unfortunately my ESL skills are insufficient to understand what are you trying to say. Even after smoking some of Canada’s finest – WTF?
“The T.REx was a damned reptile. Get over it. Most were reptiles.”
I get it, calm down – its all reptiles, all the way down…
as to liberals – as a comitted commie I have to agree, all liberals, conservatives, capitalists, jews, catholics, muslims, Daoists, nazis, trotzkists, stalinists etc. to the wall. No problemo.
but are rather blind sided when they realize that kittens are a form of mushroom.
Cladistic pedantry alert: I was under the impression that Fungi were actually a sister group to Metazoa/Animals (in contrast to birds, which are entirely within the Dinosaur clade).
Not to detract from your main point, of course – birds are dinosaurs, but they’re also really special dinosaurs, and it makes not sense to deprive them from their own category.