Jurassic Park For Real!!!

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Hello, Jurassic Park? Scientists create chickens with dinosaur features

Published time: May 13, 2015 23:24

(Reuters)

Scientists for the first time have created animals with dinosaur features using fossils as a guide. They have transformed chicken beaks into something similar to a dinosaur snout.

Many have pondered the idea of recreating dinosaurs while novelists and sci-fi film directors tempted our imagination with such as creations the Jurassic park film and novel series.

A research team led by Yale paleontologist and developmental biologist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Harvard developmental biologist Arhat Abzhanov, have conducted a successful experiment which allowed them to create chickens with dinosaur-like features. They published their discoveries in a study in the journal “Evolution” on Tuesday.

Researchers were able to transform chicken embryos in a laboratory into specimens with a snout and palate configuration similar to that of small dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx, according to a Yale press-release published on Tuesday.

“Our goal here was to understand the molecular underpinnings of an important evolutionary transition, not to create a ‘dino-chicken’ simply for the sake of it,” said Bhullar, lead author of the study.

Thought, the embryos were humanely euthanized after the experiment, Bhullar told MailOnline that in the future it may be possible to allow them to grow into animals with dinosaur features.

Why did scientists decide to transform the beak? According to them, it’s one of parts of avian anatomy that has not been changed much in the evolution process.

“The beak is a crucial part of the avian feeding apparatus, and is the component of the avian skeleton that has perhaps diversified most extensively and most radically – consider flamingos, parrots, hawks, pelicans, and hummingbirds, among others,” Bhullar said.

“Yet little work has been done on what exactly a beak is, anatomically, and how it got that way either evolutionarily or developmentally.”

The research team also found that major living lineages of birds have a unique, median gene expression zone of two different facial development genes early in embryonic development, which the non-beaked creatures lack. When they blocked this gene expression not only did the beak structure revert into a snout, but the process also caused the palatine bone on the roof of the mouth to go back to a dinosaur-like state.

“This was unexpected and demonstrates the way in which a single, simple developmental mechanism can have wide-ranging and unexpected effects,” Bhullar said.

In 2009 Jack Horner, a paleontologist at Montana State University, proposed in his book ways of“How to Build a Dinosaur” to reactivate the DNA found in chickens, dinosaur ancestors, to recreate a small predator. According to New York Times, he was very excited to know that this experiment succeeded calling it “fantastic”.

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Accidental discovery of blood, collagen in dinosaur bones could rewrite textbooks

Published time: 10 Jun, 2015 11:54
Edited time: 11 Jun, 2015 18:20
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Tyrannosaurus Rex (Reuters / Vincent West) / Reuters

An amazing discovery could rewrite textbooks, after a paleontologist accidentally found blood and soft tissue preserved in tattered dinosaur fossils. If proven, science expects answers to age-old questions, including: “Can we resurrect dinosaurs?”

The red blood cells and collagen fibers were discovered by chance when Imperial College London’s Sergio Bertazzo and Susannah Maidment were examining the buildup of calcium in human blood vessels. Bertazzo wanted to perform a few tests using electronic microscopes and ended up asking the Natural History Museum for some fossils to test his findings, according to the IB Times.

They received eight pieces, all estimated at 75 million years old.

What the pair found could prove we’ve consistently been looking at dinosaurs in the wrong way: it suggests that nearly every fossil science studied in the past century could contain similarly well-preserved blood and tissue samples, answering questions on dinosaur evolution, physiology, behavior, and whether their DNA could also be intact. From there on in, we’re entering sci-fi territory.

The accompanying study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Most of the fossils studied by the pair were very poorly-preserved fragments, including toes and claws from what could be several different species.

While collagen – the protein that helps form skin – had previously been found in a very well-preserved bone, finding it together with blood cells in a shabby one is remarkable, according to Maidment and Bertazzo. It means we could go about re-examining every bone in the museum and come up with potentially ground-breaking findings that enable us to understand how creatures lived in prehistoric times.

“One morning, I turned on the microscope, increased the magnification, and thought ‘wait - that looks like blood!’” Bertazzo said, according to the Guardian. He had already been examining the fragments for months.

At first, the two scientists thought it might have been contamination from a museum worker with a cut on their finger. But mammal blood cells don’t contain nuclei, while these blood cells did. This fact ruled out human blood.

"I thought there must be another explanation. That it was bacteria, or pollen or modern contamination. We went into it with a great deal of skepticism then attempted to eliminate every other possibly hypothesis there could possibly be,” Maidment told the IB Times.

Similar to the discovery of blood, the pair found amino acids that make up collagen, embedded inside the bone fragments. Its presence could be used to identify previously unknown specimens, unraveling whole dinosaur family trees.

Blood has its own set of secrets. The scientists believe its discovery in the fossils to be the first step towards understanding whether dinosaurs were cold, or warm-blooded, and when the switch began to occur and why.

"I think one of the key things from the blood cells is that there's a very well constrained relationship to do with metabolic rate and blood cells size among vertebrates," Maidment explained. "Within specific vertebrate groups, the smaller the blood cells the faster the metabolic rate. Animals with a faster metabolic rate tend to be warm-blooded, whereas those with a slow metabolic rate tend to be cold-blooded.

"The ancestors of dinosaurs are thought to have been cold-blooded animals, while birds' descendants are warm-blooded, so somewhere along that evolutionary lineage, from proto-dinosaurs up through to birds, you've got the evolution of warm-bloodedness,” she continued.

"That's been a subject of interest among paleontologists for some time because if they were warm-blooded that gives you the idea that these are very active, very bird-like animals. And perhaps much more bird-like than they were reptilian. If they were cold-blooded that gives us more this reptilian idea of their behavior, their habits and lifestyles."

It’s time now for more detailed studies, the pair says. “It may well be that this type of tissue is preserved far more commonly than we thought. It might even be the norm,” said Maidment, as cited by the Guardian. “This is just the first step in this research.”

Bertazzo believes the discovery “opens up the possibility of loads of specimens that may have soft tissue preserved in them, but the problem with DNA is that even if you find it, it won’t be intact. It’s possible you could find fragments, but to find more than that? Who knows?”

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