The Dino-chicken

Paleontologist Jack Horner has always been a bit of an icon. But Horner`s newest idea takes it to a new level. He wants, in short, to hatch a dinosaur.

Horner, who worked as a advisor on the Jurassic Park movie says the method used in the films won`t work, so Horner has another idea: Use the `living dinosaurs` among us to recreate creatures dead for millions of years. Anyone who`s seen "Jurassic Park" knows that birds are related to dinosaurs, part of the evolutionary line containing those toothy Velociraptors. What`s less known is that organisms carry their evolutionary history with them. Human embryos, for example, have temporary tails, which are absorbed by the body during development. Rarely, babies are born with vestigial tails, the result of scrambled genetic processes that prevent the tail from getting re-absorbed. These evolutionary remnants are called atavisms.

Enough atavisms have been discovered in birds to make the idea of "reverse-engineering" a dinosaur out of, say, a chicken possible, Horner says. You wouldn`t be adding anything to the bird to make it more dinosaurlike; all the ingredients are in its DNA. Horner`s goal is to figure out how to wake up those ingredients.