All bird species are related to one another, with one common ancestor — dinosaurs — so any bird should work. Chickens are the easiest thing to get eggs from, so I built a laboratory, hired some geneticists and developmental biologists and started seeing if we could find some of these potential atavistic genes," he said. We are trying to figure out how the tail actually works and reverse the process that formed the short tail.
So, are we any closer to making a dinosaur? I think we can do pretty much all the rest of the body. We have the potential of making an animal that has a dinosaur-like head, probably with teeth in it, and we certainly have the capability of reversing the wings to make arms and hands. We know we can do that, but right now we're just trying to fix the tail," Horner said. If humans did succeed in bringing dinosaurs back from extinction, how would we coexist?
If dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, humans are unlikely to have been able to evolve. During the million years that dinosaurs existed, mammals lived alongside them, but these animals were nocturnal and lived in burrows. This suggests that this was the only way for mammals to thrive alongside dinosaurs, emerging mainly at night to hunt. Because our lives are completely separate to that of dinosaurs, there's no way of knowing what would happen if dinosaurs were to live on the same land as us.
By observing human behavior with today's large predators, it seems unlikely that the two species would live naturally together. Humans take up so much space on the planet that introducing predators like dinosaurs outside of captivity would likely result in a battle for land.
Horner, however, has a different view. If you were cloning a real Tyrannosaur, you would have to worry about containing them. Dogs and cats were wild, but now we don't have to contain them — not to the point of making a park anyway. Even if the problem of recreating a dinosaur was overcome, could we keep them alive? In a new paper in National Science Review , Alida Bailleul and colleagues report on their discovery of remarkably well-preserved cartilage from a Late Cretaceous dinosaur, Hypacrosaurus , from North America, dated at between 74m and 80m years old.
They highlight microstructures within the cartilage that they identify as nuclei and chromosomes from within its cells and also DNA. If accurate, this would be a hugely significant find. But can this report stand the scrutiny of a sceptical world?
There are reasons to think not. Co-author and supervisor of the new work, Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University, has previously reported similar findings from a variety of tissues from dinosaurs. But the debates have been difficult because they hinge around particular specimens in particular laboratories. Researchers may be unable to replicate studies that claim to have found dinosaur biomolecules for all sorts of reasons.
One such suggestion from a sceptic, Evan Saitta at the Field Museum in Chicago, is that the biomolecules that are being detected, including the tentatively suggested DNA, probably have nothing to do with dinosaurs or even with the Cretaceous period. In terms of the science behind Jurassic Park , animals have been cloned before, but extinct species have not yet been recreated. Apparently, small insects can in fact be used to extract DNA, and there have been findings before in amber.
But there are some missing pieces in the genetic material to fully recreate something like a dino. I guess time will tell if Jurassic Park becomes real.
Jeff Goldblum is returning to his role as Dr. What do you think? The dinosaur DNA you need would have had to survive around 65m years. Perhaps life can find a way, though. A controversial palaeontologist — who also just happens to be a scientific consultant to the Jurassic Park franchise — thinks that we might have all the DNA we need: in chickens.
Scientists have managed to tweak poultry DNA to grow alligator-like teeth and a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak. On top of that, you can also consider the cretaceous plant species that give Jurassic Park its lush, verdant quality to be a write-off how were they even meant to have got the plant DNA out of a mosquito?
Catch it during Veganuary?
0コメント