Bringing back the dinosaurs

By David Wong

Jurassic Park

• Michael Crichton imagined finding a prehistoric blood sucking insect preserved in amber.

• Bydrilling into the insect andremoving genetic material and cloning it they produced dinosaurs.

• Famous paleontologist Jack Horner said “if you got something out of that insect and cloned it you would have a roomful of mosquitoes”.

Go to the Dinosaur

• The only way to obtain dinosaur DNA is to find it in a dinosaur and extract it from the soft tissue.

• Mary Schweitzer found interesting structures in T-rex bones that resembled red blood cells.

• They turned out to be heme which is what hemoglobin is made of.

• But by studying the soft tissue they learned a lot about dinosaurs

• The main thing they learned was that dinosaur DNA decayed either long ago or almost immediately after the bone was opened up.

• So cloning a dinosaur isnot yet possible and probably never will be

• Jack Horner said that if you can’t clone a dinosaur build a dinosaur.

• Birds are technically living dinosaurs and are classified as avian dinosaurs (witch are modern birds)

• Since the chicken is a dinosaur we can fix the chicken to make it more like a non-avian dinosaur (witch are all the extinct dinosaurs)

Biological modification tools

• Selection: through selective breeding you can alter a species appearance over the course of several generations.

• Selection accounts for the many breeds of dogs

Transgenesis

• The process of transplanting genes from one organism to another

• Like these glowing rats have a jellyfish gene that allows a chemical reaction that causes them to glow

Atavism Activation • The modification of an organism by bringing

out existing ancestral genes that are no longer expressed and suppressing modern genes that are expressed.

• Dr Hans Larsson (McGill university) is looking for a way to turn off the gene that causes the embryonic chickens fingers to fuse in to wings.

• As well as the wing, the teeth, and the tail of the chicken can also be recovered

• By turning off the gene that suppresses the tail growth and stimulating the gene that forms teeth

In conclusion

• It is unlikely that we could clone a dinosaur from a mosquito or even from a dinosaurs tissues

• Genetically modifying a chicken is probably the only way we could make a dinosaur

• Atavism activation is the most efficient way to make a dinosaur-like creature

Works Cited • . "Evo-Devo." http://www.paleogenetics.com. http://www.paleogenetics.com/, n.d. Web. 16 Nov 2012.

<http://www.paleogenetics.com/evodevo.html>.• • Fields, Helen. "Smithsonian Magazine." Smithsonian Magazine. (2006): n. page. Web. 16 Nov. 2012.

<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html>.• • Horner, Jack. Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken. 2011. video. http://www.ted.com/Web. 16 Nov 2012.

• Inside the Bones. N.d. http://www.pbs.org/Web. 18 Nov 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/schweitzer-bones.html>.

• Lee, Christopher. "The Washington Post ." Washington Post . (2007): n. page. Web. 16 Nov. 2012. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/12/03/ST2007120300591.html>.

• • Leishman, Ron. ROYALTY-FREE (RF) CLIP ART ILLUSTRATION OF A CARTOON WOMAN RUNNING FROM A SWARM OF

MOSQUITOES BY RON LEISHMAN . N.d. http://www.clipartof.com/Web. 16 Nov 2012. <http://www.clipartof.com/portfolio/toonaday/illustration/cartoon-woman-running-from-a-swarm-of-mosquitoes-1044562.html>.

• N.d. http://www.petrifiedhumanbrain.com/Web. 18 Nov 2012. <http://www.petrifiedhumanbrain.com/microscopic.html>.