Scientists say they can remodel living dinosaurs for 5 years

Dinosaurs may soon return to real life, because the paleontologist who inspired Michael Crichton to shoot the original film Jurassic Park announced a research project to bring extinct creatures back to life. Dr. Jack Horner says scientists only need 5-10 years to rebuild living dinosaurs.

Horner works with scientists from Harvard and Yale, looking for the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs in the hope of changing them. “Of course, birds are dinosaurs,” said Horner. “Therefore, we just need to change them to look like dinosaurs.”


Horner and his group will start with the modern chicken, recognized as a direct descendant of the massive lizards that once ruled the earth. Horner advised all four films of Jurassic Park. In a behind-the-scenes interview from the first film, writer Michael Crichton admitted that his hero, Dr. Alan Grant, was a mixture of Horner and Philip J. Kerry.

A 71-year-old paleontologist said that when he first started working on films, he believed that dinosaurs would be returned in the same way as in the film - through preserved pieces of their DNA taken from fossils. However, over the years, he and his colleagues have begun to better understand how DNA is destroyed, and decided that this is not the path they need to go.

According to Horner, chicken and many other modern birds have many common genes with dinosaurs. He believes that they will be able to manipulate them in order to reverse the evolutionary process - initiating changes that will express more and more ancient characteristics.

“Dinosaurs had long tails, limbs and hands - and as a result of evolution, they lost their tails, and limbs and hands turned into wings,” Horner explained to reporters. “In addition, the entire morphology of their mouth has changed from a Velociraptor-like shape to a bird's beak.” Horner believes his work will determine the way to flip the gene switch "so that we return these hereditary characteristics."

Horner called the 2015 study his “proof of concept” , noting that scientists from Harvard and Yale were able to turn the head of a bird into the face of a dinosaur.

“In essence, we are using an embryo that is just beginning to form, and we’ll use some genetic markers to identify when the right genes turn on and off,” he said. “And determining when the right genes turn on, we can find out how the tail begins to develop. And we want to fix these genes so that they don't stop the tail from growing. ”

Horner is sure that some form of lizard, which he called the “chicken-saur”, will walk on the ground in 10 years.

“We can grow a bird with teeth, and we can change its mouth,” he said. “In fact, wings and brushes are not so complicated. We are confident that we can do this in the near future. ”

The project, however, is not an easy task, and Horner noted that “tailing is the biggest problem. But on the other hand, recently we were able to do some things that gave us hope that it would not take too much time. ”