[Kosh]

A real Jurassic Park in the pipeline?

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.

Larsson believes by flipping certain genetic levers during a chicken embryo's development, he can reproduce the dinosaur anatomy, he told AFP in an interview.

Though still in its infancy, the research could eventually lead to hatching live prehistoric animals, but Larsson said there are no plans for that now, for ethical and practical reasons -- a dinosaur hatchery is "too large an enterprise."

"It's a demonstration of evolution," said Larsson, who has studied bird evolution for the last 10 years.

"If I can demonstrate clearly that the potential for dinosaur anatomical development exists in birds, then it again proves that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs."

[Flipside]

Hans Larsson, the Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal's McGill University, said he aims to develop dinosaur traits that disappeared millions of years ago in birds.

I half expected that to continue...

"And now, he is Pterodactyl Man! Forever watchful with his mutant reptilian eyes for evildoers!"

Other than that, interesting stuff

[General Battuta]

Okay. Hang on.

Evolution is not directional. Defined at its simplest, evolution is simply a change in allele frequency in a population over time (if I recall correctly.) This is something a lot of people (including most of the anti-evolution blowhards) don't understand: evolution does not imply 'progress', it does not imply motion in a particular direction. What this guy is doing is more of...genetic archaeology?

There's got to be a better term for this.

[Flipside]

Agreed, even scientists fall into that particular trap occasionally, of thinking of Evolution as 'ongoing improvement', rather than 'ongoing adaptation', it because of a perfectly natural tendency, even in science, to place ourselves as the ultimate outcome of it, even though we are not the newest species on the planet.

I suppose, from a presentation point of view, it's an accurate description of what he is doing, he's attempting to re-activate genetic traits that were active in our past, however, that doesn't mean they'll never active again in the future, so possibly even genetic archaeology might be misleading, I suppose, if I were to be anal about it, the most accurate description would be something like Latent Gene Investigation.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Quite a bit of this kid of work has already been done in the lab.  Chickens with teeth, birds with scales instead of feathers etc. 

[Flipside]

I have my reservations that you could ever get anything that was a 'real' dinosaur out of the research to be honest. some cellular structures will get recombined with others and start performing completely different tasks during the course of evolution, I'm really not sure you could really reset everything to the situation they were in 65 million years ago, some of those 'levers' may well be extremely hard to find.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well the one thing they do have going for them is the discovery of soft tissue inside of fossils containing partial DNA from actual dinosaurs.  They find enough of that and they would have a blueprint to go by. 

[Thaeris]

So long as in the post-apocalyptic Wild West I can ride my steel-plated T-Rex into battle wielding a flame thrower, I'm good...

-Thaeris

[Kosh]

Quite a bit of this kid of work has already been done in the lab.  Chickens with teeth, birds with scales instead of feathers etc. 

Can anyone say "Greasel"?

[Colonol Dekker]

I demand scaly chicken teeth pics

[StarSlayer]

I for one welcome our Chickensaurus Rex overlords.

[Kosh]

Okay. Hang on.

Evolution is not directional. Defined at its simplest, evolution is simply a change in allele frequency in a population over time (if I recall correctly.) This is something a lot of people (including most of the anti-evolution blowhards) don't understand: evolution does not imply 'progress', it does not imply motion in a particular direction. What this guy is doing is more of...genetic archaeology?

There's got to be a better term for this.

It's still going in reverse because they are taking something and reverting it BACK to the form it previously evolved from. Personally I think that compared with the Mesazoic, life is quite a bit more boring than it was.

[Flipside]

I do believe there is actually a scientific theory about that Kosh, that the more 'radical' type of life is too fragile to environmental change, so as evolution passes (I recoil from using the word 'progresses') the gene-pool gets cleaned of the edges, so life is more resilient, but not as experimental in nature.

Once again, I'm loathe to personify nature by saying it learns from its mistakes, but there is a natural tendency for this sort of thing to happen in systems, chaos spawns organisation at some point, even if the chaos is still present.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, highly specialized species end up struggling when their specifically suitable environment changes. Of course this holds true for all species - change equals strife and the fastest adapting species will flourish - but for species that are so dependant on some feature of their environment, changes can be all that much more swift in ending the species.

Good example would be polar bears as opposed to normal bears. Polar bears have adapted to life at polar maritime regions in a way that requires perennial sea ice. If that changes, polar bears go bye bye unless the change happens very, very gradually and some polar bears simply change their ways so that they can produce offspring without sea ice coverage.

Another historical example would be wool mammoth, although controversy exists as to whether it was hunted to extinction or if it simply didn't have time to adapt to the warming climate.

Yet another example of very likely irreversible evolutionary path would be the cetaceans. They started as quadruped land animals and ended up with behemoths almost completely adapted to living in oceans, and for them to become capable of land life again they would need to first of all develope a mutation that makes their hind legs grow back, then reduce their size and go through some immense skeletal and morphologic changes for them to step away from water. It's very difficult to see that happening within normal evolution.


Besides regarding feathers and dinosaurian/avian features, isn't it at least a very credible possibility that part or even majority of dinosaurs were feathered to begin with? Making scaly birds sounds more like kickback to reptilian ancestry rather than dinosaurian. Now, make me an ostritch that has teeth, tail and arms that it can use to grab stuff... and I'll say it is a dinosaur.

Of course, I consider all avian species to be higly specialized branch of dinosaurs and only named differently due to historical reasons...

[Flipside]

I suppose, at least with Cetaceans, water is a pretty safe medium to make that kind of evolutionary commitment in, evidence suggests atmosphere and land masses change far more frequently and profoundly than the composition of the Ocean. It's certainly had the same level of salinity for an extreme long time.

I'm still not sold entirely on the feathered dinosaur idea, I can accept that certain branches of the family developed feathers, and that branch was better adapted to surviving the post dinosaur environment (possibly because of the extra warmth provided by the feathers?) and developed into birds, but I suspect they were more the exception than the rule at the time.

Problem is, when looking back 97 million years, it's kind of uncertain we will ever know for absolute certainty. I know certain amber-trapped specimens etc have suggested feathered dinosaurs, but from what I understand the finds seem to be centred in China, whereas European and American dinosaurs show far fewer bird-like qualities?

[General Battuta]

I heard from Paul Serrano, a fairly big archaeologist, that he believes all dinosaurs were feathered - but I think it was just a hunch.

[Mongoose]

I know there have been fossil impressions of scaly dinosaur skin, so I'd say it's a safe bet that at least some of them looked like the pop-culture imagery.

[Flipside]

I do recall, some years ago, that there was experimentation into the pigmentation of Dinosaur skin and it was suggested that there was a strong possibility they were much more brightly coloured than the traditional greys and greens, with markings more akin to tigers or the more colourful lizards.

[Ford Prefect]

Of course, I consider all avian species to be higly specialized branch of dinosaurs and only named differently due to historical reasons...

That's what I was taught in college: That birds are considered to be living dinosaurs. I remember it was confusing because there were the ornithischians, meaning "bird-hipped," and the saurischians, meaning "lizard-hipped," but birds actually evolved from the latter group.

[Kosh]

I suppose, at least with Cetaceans, water is a pretty safe medium to make that kind of evolutionary commitment in, evidence suggests atmosphere and land masses change far more frequently and profoundly than the composition of the Ocean.

Megalodon might have something to say about that.......