Paleontologist Jack Horner Wants to Resurrect Dinosaurs Using Chickens

Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken

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".

Here's the problem we have with this. If we're creating a dinosaur, say a T-Rex by stimulating leftover genes, how can we be sure that our version of the T-Rex is the one from the past? Researchers have already been able to create a chicken with teeth by using atavism activation, but without the complete DNA of a dinosaur for comparison, we're just making things up as we go. The truth of the matter is that this won't be a dinosaur of any sort - it will be a modified hen.

Source: www.ted.com