Wednesday, January 29, 2014

TED talk on Genetics and Dinosaurs by Jack Horner

One of the great mysteries that surrounds the early times of the world are dinosaurs. The dinosaurs where these massive, powerful creatures that roamed the world hunting and leaving a lot of untold secrets in the ground.

So what if you could create a dinosaur from a current animal like a chicken or a dog? Well a paleontologist by the name of Jack Horner had a dream like this for his whole life, and he spent his life trying to find the DNA needed to recreate a real living dinosaur. Jack Horner, who had an amazing sense of humor, talked in this TED talk about how we can actually change a chicken into dinosaur. He was part of a handful of dinosaur digs that recovered a lot of soft tissue, and even red blood cells. Including things like atavism activation and tons of primitive and prehistoric examples, he makes a really good argument for how we could change a chicken into a dinosaur using DNA and changing its genetics.

 This is something that I find really interesting, and when he explains it, it definitely makes it look like we could easily make a dinosaur from a chicken. The only issue is we need to find a dinosaur with living DNA in its blood and tissue so that we could create this Jurassic Park like creature.

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