Palaeontology

Real-life 'Jurassic World' within 10 years ?

By T.K. Randall
June 21, 2015 ·  28 comments

Are birds the key to recreating live dinosaurs ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5 Gerhard Boeggemann James Horner, who served as technical advisor for all the Jurassic Park movies and was the real-life inspiration for the character Dr Alan Grant, has suggested that bringing dinosaurs back to life might be possible within as little as ten years.

Unlike in the original Jurassic Park movie however he does not believe that locating dinosaur DNA trapped in amber is going to be a viable way of making this happen because it cannot survive for millions of years without breaking down no matter how well it is preserved.

Instead, he argues, birds hold the key to creating living dinosaurs in the present day.

"Chickens and all birds are carrying much bigger chunks of dinosaur DNA than we are ever likely to find in the fossil record," he said.

Just last month scientists announced that they'd been able to regress a chicken's beak back in to a dinosaur-like snout by tampering with its gene proteins - a major step towards creating a dinosaur."We can get teeth into a bird and just recently a team from Yale and Harvard have managed to retro-engineer [a bird's] beak back into a dinosaur-looking mouth," said Horner.

"So we basically have the tail to reinstate, and to transform the wings back into an arm and hand."

How long exactly it will take to accomplish this however remains a matter of debate.

"We might find a couple of these genes tomorrow or it might take 10 years," said Horner.

"There is just no way to predict."

Source: Discovery News | Comments (28)

Tags: Jurassic World, Dinosaur