Find an ancient mosquito in the amber. Isolate dinosaur blood from his stomach. Extract DNA from there and inject it into the crocodile embryo. Hatch the egg. Feed the dinosaur. Discover the Jurassic Park. When Michael Crichton wrote his bestseller (1990), and Steven Spielberg shot his blockbuster (1993), it all seemed to be a matter of the distant future. What is the situation now?
It turns out that scientists do not see anything fantastic in the creation of dinosaurs. However, the method will be completely different.
Unfortunately, DNA molecules break down over time. 65 million years have passed since the last dinosaur flew, swam or walked on the earth, and DNA rarely remains intact for more than 500 thousand years. According to Jack Horner of Montana State University (USA), a renowned paleontologist and technical consultant for all Jurassic Park films, dinosaur DNA has never been found. He and his colleagues were able to find Tyrannosaurus rex soft tissue in 2005, but they did not contain any useful material.
Even if dinosaur DNA is ever found, it will be in a deplorable state: fragments of code consisting of only a few base pairs. Moreover, science does not know how to sew these fragments together. In short, sequencing the genome of dinosaurs from fossilized tissue or blood will never be a reliable way to revive them.
But geneticists offer an alternative route. In recent years, several groups, working independently of each other, have begun to "wake up" dormant dinosaur DNA in one of the offspring - a chicken, whose genome is fully sequenced. Mr. Horner and his friends are going to end up with a chicken with teeth, scales, tail, and front legs. In their opinion, this creature will be very similar to a real dinosaur.
In 2005, ontogeneticists John Fallon and Matt Harris from the University of Wisconsin (USA) experimented with mutant chicken embryos and noticed strange outgrowths on the embryo's jaws. The "bumps" turned out to be saber-shaped teeth, which were identical to the teeth of alligator embryos.
These mutants possessed a recessive gene that kills the fetus before birth. As a side effect, this gene turns on another, dormant in the evolutionary line of chickens for at least 70 million years - the ancient gene for dinosaur teeth. Fallon and Harris created a virus that behaved like a recessive gene, but was not fatal. When the virus was injected into normal embryos, teeth began to grow.
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Then paleontologist Hans Larsson from McGill University (USA) discovered that at an early stage in the development of a chicken embryo, the embryo has a tail. At a certain point, the genetic switch does a somersault, and the tail disappears. Mr. Larsson and his colleagues are desperate to get the tail back, but so far without success.
In a similar vein, chicken embryos can eventually be endowed with other traits of a distant ancestor.
How long is there to wait? “Well, it depends on funding,” says Mr. Horner. “We haven't defeated cancer yet, so it's unlikely that the dinosaur revival project will be able to get something out of those already meager royalties that go to research. However, some private investor may decide that this is cool, and then …"