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Dinosaurs could potentially walk among us in
real life soon as the paleontologist who inspired the original Jurassic Park
movie has announced a research project to bring the extinct creatures back to
life. Dr. Jack Horner says scientists are only 5 to 10 years away from
genetically engineering dinosaurs into existence.
According to a report by PEOPLE, Horner is
working with scientists at Harvard and Yale, looking to the closest living
relatives of dinosaurs in the hopes of reverse-engineering them. “Of course,
birds are dinosaurs," Horner said. "So we just need to fix them so
they look a little more like a dinosaur."
Horner and his team will reportedly begin with
the modern day chicken, which is widely considered a direct descendant of the
massive beasts that once dominated the earth. Horner has consulted on all four
Jurassic Park films. In a behind the scenes interview from the first movie in
the franchise, writer Michael Crichton confessed that the hero, Dr. Alan Grant,
was an amalgam of Horner and Philip J. Currie.
The 71-year-old paleontologist said that when
he first began work on the movies, he believe dinosaurs would be revived in the
same way they are in the film -- through preserved bits of their DNA taken from
fossils.
However, in the years since, he and his
colleagues have come to better understand how DNA degrades over time, and
determined that this is not the course they will have to take.
As Horner sees it, the chicken, and many other
modern birds, have the genetic code of their dinosaur ancestors stored within
their own DNA. He believes they will be able to manipulate that code to reverse
the evolutionary process -- forcing mutations that will express more and more
of those ancient characteristics.
“Dinosaurs had long tails, arms, and hands –
and through evolution they’ve lost their tails, and their arms and hands have
turned into wings," Horner explained to reporters. "Additionally,
their whole snout has changed from the velociraptor-look to the bird-like beak
morphology.” Horner said he hopes his work will determine a way to flip a
switch “in such a way that we’ll get these ancestral characteristics back.”
Horner cited a 2015 study as his "proof
of concept," noting that scientists at Harvard and Yale were able to trick
a bird's head into changing into a dinosaur snout.
“Basically what we do is we go into an embryo
that’s just beginning to form, and use some genetic markers to sort of identify
when certain genes turn on and when they turn off,” he said.. “And by
determining when certain genes turn on, we can sort of figure out how a tail
begins to develop. And we want to fix that gene so it doesn t stop the tail
from growing.”
Horner was completely confident that some form
of what he called a "chickensoraus" will be walking the earth within
ten years. “We can make a bird with teeth, and we can change its mouth,” he
said. “And actually the wings and hands are not as difficult. We’re pretty sure
we can do that soon.”
The project is no simple task, however, and
Horner noted that “the tail is the biggest project. But on the other hand, we
have been able to do some things recently that have given us hope that it won’t
take too long.”
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