The famous American paleontologist Jack Horner, who at one time participated in the work on the film "Jurassic Park", intends to bring to life a movie scenario and create a real living dinosaur.
According to the scientist, there is nothing particularly difficult in this, and you do not even have to look for a prehistoric mosquito that got into the resin, barely drinking dinosaur blood. Very modern creatures will help to bring out an ancient reptile - those that, according to one of the theories, descended from dinosaurs. It's about birds.
“We will take the chicken embryo as a starting point and use genetic engineering to force it to go back in time until we 'pull out' the dinosaur that lurks inside it. Initially, it will not be quite a dinosaur, but a creature that has many of its features,”the scientist said. The subsequent "loneliness" of this creature will take, according to Horner, not so much time - five, seven years.
In the early stages, the chicken embryo develops the features of a dinosaur: teeth, legs with three fingers
Photo: globallookpress.com
It should be noted that the very idea of creating a "kurosaurus" (or "dinokura" - whatever you like) is not so new. The first loud statements in the press on this score were made several years ago. For example, Horner's colleague from Canada, Hans Larsson, announced in 2009 that he was working on a similar project, while clarifying that it was an American paleontologist who inspired him to accomplish this.
But Horner himself does not sit still. “When I was little, I dreamed of two things. The first is to become a paleontologist. The second is to have your own dinosaur,”the scientist admitted earlier. Actually, he became a paleontologist, and learning more and more about dinosaurs, he became more and more enthusiastic about these prehistoric animals, and the desire to fulfill his second childhood dream grew. And according to Horner himself, there is nothing left until its implementation.
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"Kurosaurus" with fangs is almost a reality
The process of creating a "kurosaurus" as described by Horner does not seem so complicated. But there are nuances: for example, it is impossible to grow a dinosaur from an ancient drop of blood, as in the same "Jurassic Park". “If you take a piece of amber with a mosquito inside, and extract something from a mosquito, and then clone it, and so many times, you get a whole room of mosquitoes. And then there's a whole bunch of trees,”Horner joked at the Science Foundation's TED last year. "So if you want dinosaur DNA, you need to look for the dinosaur."
Find it, according to the researcher, can be found in the descendants of dinosaurs - birds. And among them the chicken was chosen as the most studied species. "We know her genome by heart." “This will not be just a gene modification. We intend to wake up atavistic genes in the DNA of birds and make them reappear, - explained the paleontologist. - First, we need to identify specific genes in the chicken genome and change the level of certain regulatory proteins. In the first stages, the chicken embryo develops the features of a dinosaur: teeth, legs with three fingers."
You will get something like this
Photo: globallookpress.com
By the way, the gene responsible for the presence or absence of teeth has already been found, so at the moment scientists can theoretically create a chicken with fangs. But not a monster - but a creature of quite an ordinary chicken size. But even in a few years, when scientists get to a real dinosaur, the result of their work will not be dangerous. As the scientist stated in an interview with Live Science, he wants to breed a small herbivorous dinosaur. “I’ll make sure that my new pet doesn’t eat my other pets or myself.”