How to Build a Dinosaur

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1. hx2aFeb 2025
   I once read a book about this: How to Build a Dinosaur: The New Science of Reverse Evolution, by Jack Horner and James Gorman. The basic idea is that dinosaur DNA is carried around by modern day chickens. The concept seemed pretty out there but the book does make a convincing argument for why it should be possible. The first author is a well known paleontologist, and the book was recommended to me by a paleontologist before I spent the week (as a volunteer) in his field crew.

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   > The technology for this doesn't exist yet, and the ethics would be extremely questionable.

   I do agree with this. Just because we can do it, doesn't mean we should.

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2. jonny_ehJun 2013
   If you're interested in that technique, check out Jack Horner's book "How to Build a Dinosaur" [1]

   [1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Dinosaur-Science-Evolution/d...

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3. jcastroFeb 2013
   I recommend reading Jack Horner's "How to build a Dinosaur", he talks about this sort of thing, namely that you can take an existing flightless bird, give it teeth, a tail, and flip the arms around and you've basically got a dinosaur.

   The creepy part is people are actually messing around with chicken genes and can turn on things like "grow teeth" and "grow a tail".

   - http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fro...

   You'd think the guy who was the dinosaur adviser for Jurassic Park would actually learn the lesson from the movie, so if we all get eaten to death by chickens, here's your guy.

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4. mechanical_fishNov 2008
   And now it is time to recommend an excellent book (though that book is now eleven years old and is probably becoming dated by the minute):

   The Science of Jurassic Park and the Lost World, or How to Build a Dinosaur by Rob DeSalle and David Lindley

   You don't need to have read or seen Jurassic Park to appreciate the book.

   At the risk of providing spoilers: The book is, ultimately, a catalog of reasons why cloning dinosaurs is impossible. ;) The simplest reason is that genetic material is very fragile, but once you get beyond that there are many more entertaining reasons, ranging from the profound (fetal development is dependent on the mother's physiology as well as the child's genetic code -- you quite literally have a chicken-and-egg problem when you're trying to clone an extinct creature) to the surprisingly profound (If a live dinosaur walked outside, could he find anything to eat, given that so many of our modern plants evolved after dinosaurs were already extinct? If he did eat anything, would he be able to digest it without his intestinal flora, many of which are probably also extinct? Or would he simply be eaten by one of our modern predators, anything from an eagle to a bacterium?)

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