Comments on: How to Turn a Dinosaur Into a Bird

By: J.P.S

J.P.S — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:27:38 +0000

Creating a dinosaur from a bird a brilliant idea however to make the experiment as real as possible you would also have to turn on the predatory gene as well as the teeth,arms and tail.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:51:16 +0000

@ Francine. That would be true if there was that much difference between birds and dinosaurs, but alas birds are not the descendants of dinosaurs they ARE dinosaurs. Chickens are much much closer to maniraptora than we are to chimps. All these biologists are doing is repressing atavistic traits that already exist. So really there is hardly anything being tinkered with at all. The experiments have already been completed by Horner, Garmon, Laarson, and Abzhanov on individual traits in chicks (which were not allowed to hatch). Now if we can only combine their efforts and hatch the thing.

By: Francine

Francine — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:29:26 +0000

A “relatively minimal amount of tinkering”?

There’s a mere 4% difference in the DNA of chimpanzees vs. humans. Does this mean that with an extremely minimal amount of tinkering – substantially less than is proposed for this dino-bird project – we could make revive the long-lost ancestor of both primates???

I think, more likely, someone hasn’t done their genome homework.

By: charles222

charles222 — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:34:40 +0000

Well, this post of mine is pretty silly, but I bet chickenosaurus, when it finally hatches, turns out to be a fairly imposing predator. My mother in law has a clutch of hens and a rooster, and that rooster is about the worst-tempered animal I’ve had the displeasure of meeting. It’s super-territorial and afraid of nothing.

By: Matthew Platte

Matthew Platte — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 16:06:31 +0000

What does “belief” have to do with the story of dinosaur > bird?