We will have a living dinosaur! - promised at the time the authoritative American paleontologist Jack Horner from Montana State University, who, according to the legends of Hollywood, inspired Steven Spielberg to create the famous film "Jurassic Park". And as they say, did not throw words to the wind. Both he and his colleagues are close to making the promise come true.
“We will take a bird embryo,” the scientist explained, “and using genetic engineering methods, we will“pull out”a dinosaur that lurks inside each of them.
Horner's plans are based on a real discovery made by an international team of Spanish and American paleontologists. Using computed tomography and mathematical modeling, they found striking similarities in the anatomy of birds and baby dinosaurs - especially their skulls.
And in the end, they came to the conclusion that today's birds are the same dinosaurs, only stopped in their development at the stage of cubs. A similar phenomenon in evolution is called pedomorphism. It occurs at the genetic level as a result of some kind of failure in the hereditary program.
Velociraptor looks like a toothy bird
Veloceraptors may have been covered in feathers. One word - relatives of today's chickens. And since birds are essentially dinosaurs - only unfinished ones, then they must have a genetic memory of their distant past, thanks to which the dormant genes can be woken up and turn any chick into some kind of lizard. At least a Tyrannosaurus. And you don't have to look for mosquitoes imprinted in amber to extract dinosaur DNA from their blood for subsequent cloning.
By the way, if you believe the researchers from Murdoch University (Western Australia), then cloning the lizards will never work. Because their DNA strands are already completely destroyed. According to the Australians, the maximum shelf life of fossil genetic material is about 7 million years. And the last dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.
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Back to the Future
The discovery of pedomorphism in dinosaurs implies that they did not become extinct at all, but were reborn as birds. This is what scientists intend to use to recreate the Jurassic world.
Recently paleontologist Dr Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and biologist Dr Arhat Abzhanov from Yale University created chicken embryos with dinosaur faces.
The transformation happened due to the fact that the experimenters were able to suppress the development of proteins that are involved in the formation and development of beaks. As a result, the beaks did not grow, the bones that form them fused, and the skulls of chicken embryos began to look like the skulls of velociraptors.
Creepy mutants could be born - two-legged feathered creatures with the wings and muzzles of lizards. But scientists were obliged to stop experiments at the last stages of embryo development.
Instead of a beak (center), the chicken now has dinosaur-like jaws.
Toothy chicks
The predecessors of Bhular and Abzhanov managed to grow teeth in chickens by activating genes that fell asleep about 70 million years ago.
First, French woman Josaine Fontaine-Perus from the University of Nantes studied teeth, then Paul Sharpe, professor at King's College London. They triggered the genetic mechanism of tooth growth in chicken embryos by transplanting mouse cells, which served as a kind of switches.
The chicken (right) has a tooth
Then Matthew Harris of the Max Planck Institute took over. He provoked already natural mutations, amplified by viruses. And he raised full-fledged conical teeth in chickens. Now it's up to the three-toed paws, forelimbs and size. So that the dinosaur did not turn out to be as tall as a chicken, but at least from an ostrich.
“We will awaken all atavistic genes in the DNA of birds and force them to reappear,” Horner threatens.