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Scientists try to genetically engineer chickens into Velociraptors.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150618-jurassic-world-genetic-engineering-chickenosaurus/Birds are living dinosaurs. They’re not quite like a Stegosaurus or Apatosaurus, true, but they’re another line of dinosaurs that sprouted about 150 million years ago and survived while all their relatives went extinct. And since birds' genes hold clues to their prehistoric past just as their anatomy does, some scientists are looking to these living dinosaurs to reconstruct their long-lost relatives.
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Some of the necessary changes to create a chickenosaurus are already starting to come together. In 2006 biologist Matthew Harris found that chicken embryos can grow rudimentary teeth. Then, just last month, a pair of independent studies were able to make birds more Velociraptor-like.
After discovering that the perching toe of modern birds starts to develop only once embryos start twitching their muscles, biologist João Francisco Botelho and colleagues paralyzed that toe in developing birds and found that it retained the ancestral anatomy seen in non-avian dinosaurs.
Around the same time, geneticist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar of Harvard and coauthors announced that they were able to create experimental chickens that lacked beaks and had jaws closer in form to those of dinosaurs like Velociraptor. With a few more changes—such as a long, balancing tail—scientists will be pretty close to making what’ll look like a Cretaceous cockerel.
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It wouldn’t be a moment of resurrection, but reinvention.
http://www.livescience.com/50886-scientific-progress-dino-chicken.html
"From a quantitative point of view, we're 50 percent there," said Jack Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University and a curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.
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There are four major modifications needed to make a so-called chickenosaurus, Horner said. To turn a chicken into a dinosaurlike beast, scientists would have to give it teeth and a long tail, and revert its wings back into arms and hands.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12684/pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12684/abstract;jsessionid=C24D11AE6B74F018D70432D5658C9004.f04t04
Scientists have cloned chicken-embryos with lizardish snouts.
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001957
Scientists have discovered that the evolutionary mutation from dinosaur-arms to wings works both ways.
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It was frightening enough to be attacked by my grandma's crazy rooster when I was a kid . . . now, in my old age, I'm to have nightmares about a chickenosaurus attack?
Or, if one uses a duck instead of a chicken we can call it a Snap Quack.
(At least I tried.)
