Chickenosaurus: How Dinosaurs Could Be Making a Comeback in the Next Five Years

https://people.com/movies/jurassic-world-how-dinosaurs-are-making-a-real-comeback-thanks-to-science/

Famed paleontologist Dr. Jack Horner, who’s been a consultant on all four films and is the real-life inspiration for Jurassic Park‘s dinosaur expert Dr. Alan Grant, believes we’re (optimistically) just five years away from genetically engineering a dinosaur.

When he first started advising Steven Spielberg, Horner and his colleagues believed the most viable way to bring a dino back to life was through tapping into ancient strands of genetic code. (The animated DNA cartoon from the first film does a good job of explaining where scientist’s heads were at 20 years ago.)

Since then, further study into the way DNA degrades over time has ruled that option out. But in a classic case of life imitating art, Horner says that the genetic engineering angle of the Jurassic World plot gave him an idea: What if the best way to produce a dinosaur is by reversing evolution?

In other words, what if we took a bird like a chicken (which already holds the prehistoric genetic markers of its dinosaur ancestors) and flipped the right switches to mutate the animal back to its prehistoric roots.

https://news.yale.edu/2015/05/12/tweaking-beak-retracing-bird-s-beak-its-dinosaur-origins-laboratory/

Using the fossil record as a guide, a research team led by Yale paleontologist and developmental biologist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Harvard developmental biologist Arhat Abzhanov conducted the first successful reversion of a bird’s skull features. The scientists replicated ancestral molecular development to transform chicken embryos in a laboratory into specimens with a snout and palate configuration similar to that of small dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.