LONG BEACH, California -- You know the scene in Jurassic Park. Sam Neill's character Dr. Alan Grant and a group of naïve visitors enter the dinosaur island's birthing lab just at the moment a large egg begins to wobble and crack. The determined creature inside pecks its way out of the shell, and suddenly a velociraptor is born -- more than 70 million years after its species was supposed to have become extinct.
Only in the movies, right?
Not if you’re paleontologist Jack Horner, the inspiration for Neill's character, who is on a mission to bring dinosaurs back -- or at least the modern-day version of one.
Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and regent’s professor at Montana State University, has been working with researchers to produce a dino-chicken or chickensaurus -- a chicken with prehistoric features such as a tail and hands. The research has been featured on 60 Minutes and elsewhere.
Chickens, and other birds, are descendants of dinosaurs and carry the dino DNA. In the embryo stage, chickens actually have a tail, which disappears before the bird hatches. Horner believes that if researchers can find the gene that turns off the tail -- and turn it back on -- they can hatch a chicken that resembles a dinosaur.
Horner will be speaking about his work at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference on Friday. He talked about his dino project with Wired.com in advance of his presentation.
Wired.com: Why did you choose a chicken for your experiment and not an ostrich or some other bird? Is there a reason a chicken is more suitable?
Jack Horner:They're easier to come by. Ostriches cost a lot of money. That really is the only reason. And the generation time is quicker. A chicken grows up in a little less time than an ostrich. An ostrich takes a whole year. A chicken takes a few months. You'd probably be better off using a smaller bird, but there gets to be some logistical problems with them. You can go and get plenty of eggs of chickens, but it's pretty hard to go and get plenty of eggs of robins.
Wired.com: Have you been able to identify the gene responsible for the tail yet?
JH: We’re still trying to identity two genes -- the tail and the hands. The [researchers] knock out one gene per embryo. It will probably take hundreds [of embryos] to find the gene.
Wired.com: How many have you gone through so far?
JH: It's probably around a dozen or so -- a carton of eggs. We don't have a great deal of funding for this, as you can probably imagine, so it's a slow process right now. We’re still trying to figure out what the best protocols are.
It's done in the very simplest stages of embryo genesis. When you're trying to knock out a gene, you haven't let the embryo develop more than a few rounds of duplications. And then you're just letting whatever you create develop in the egg, but it doesn't hatch. In fact most that have been made, are lethal. [The experiment] kills the embryo.
Wired.com: Why is that?
JH: That's a good question. You'll have to ask a geneticist. There are just some genes that are on, and some that are off, that are not good for the animal, for the developing embryo.
Wired.com: You're not changing the DNA at all in these experiments.
JH: We're not changing the DNA, and we're not making real transgenic animals. In other words, we're not doing anything that actually changes them at the level of DNA. But that is another tool [we could use], as well. I mean they make GloFish, right? There's a company that makes a thing called GloFish and they take genes out of jellyfish that glow, and they put them into the DNA of Zebrafish and make them glow pink or some other color.
Wired.com: And then sell them to 6-year-old girls going through their princess phase.
JH: Exactly.
So that's a possibility -- take a gene out of an animal and stick it into the chicken, but we just don't know enough about what all the genes do. All we’re trying to do right now is just figure out the simplest way to make a chicken or any bird look like a dinosaur.
Wired.com: Why is it important to create a dinosaur or chickensaur? What will it help us or tell us?
JH: It’s not going to put food on the table or gas in the car, but it's certainly going to tell us a lot about evolution. The whole point is to actually see what's involved in the transformation between dinosaurs and birds -- to see what happened. When the embryo is growing, it starts producing a tail. But what happens is, a gene turns on -- at least this is our hypothesis -- that actually resorbs the tail, gets rid of it, during embryo genesis. The same thing happens with humans. We start growing a tail, and then, it's probably the same gene [that is in the chicken], turns on and resorbs that tail.
What we’re trying to do is identify that gene and keep it from turning on, and just let the animal hatch out with its tail.
Wired.com: In 2009, you predicted you would have a dino-chicken in five years. Are you on track to meet that?
JH: I think it’s still reasonable. But it does depend on funding. We need to hurry up here pretty soon, but I think it's still a reasonable deadline.
