How did the scientist cross the chicken?

Some of the world's leading paleontologists are attempting to recreate a dinosaur -- or something a lot like a dinosaur -- by starting with a chicken embryo and working backward to engineer a "chickenosaurus" or "dinochicken," project leader Jack Horner told Discovery News.

Such "reverse evolution" has been successfully performed in mice and flies, but those studies focused on re-introducing just a few bygone traits. The dinochicken project instead has the goal of bringing back multiple dinosaur characteristics, such as a tail, teeth and forearms, by changing the levels of regulatory proteins that have evolved to suppress these characteristics in birds.

Posted by David on March 8, 2009 10:45 PM