Every cell of a turkey carries the blueprints for making a tyrannosaurus, but the way the plans get read changes over time as the species evolves.All Horner had to do was learn how to control the control genes.

He saw in their hundreds-of-millions-of-years-old skeletons hints of sociability, of animals that lived in herds, unlike modern reptiles. The chicken embryo whose protein activity had been modified shows the ancestral snout. “That is one good reason to do this in a chicken instead of an ostrich,” says Horner, whose deadpan humor comes in a slow, easy-to-miss burn. He says he’s going to do it by reverse-evolving a chicken. We Need a New ‘Legend of Zelda’ Cartoon

Judging by their skeletons, the baby duckbills would have been too feeble to forage on their own. Convert that into an embryo and bring it to term in an elephant uterus.

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But he wants to learn how dinosaurs became birds, not turn back the evolutionary clock. Raising chickens that have been genetically modified so that they are born without beaks, feathers, or feet, or with additional legs is still beyond the reach of … “I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist—and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur.”Already, researchers have found tantalizing clues that at least some ancient dinosaur characteristics can be reactivated. “It’s crazy,” Horner says. In particular, they didn't have beaks: they had snouts, like those of their dinosaur ancestors.To understand how one changed into another, a team has been tampering with the molecular processes that make up a beak in chickens.By doing so, they have managed to create a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout and palate, similar to that of small feathered dinosaurs like The team's aim was to understand how the bird beak evolved, because the beak is such a vital part of bird anatomy. "To begin to understand this, the team trawled though changes in the ways genes are expressed in the embryos of chickens and several other animals. Photo: Joe Pugliese. “I peeled it back and then stopped—the specimen was smiling back at me.” Scores of scientists had studied talpidHarris and his colleagues soon discovered that by stimulating production of a protein called beta-catenin in chick embryos, they could get normal, nonmutants to produce neat rows of conical, crocodile-like tooth buds along their upper and lower beaks. Genetically Modified Chickens. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail. Where Does ‘Castlevania’ Go From Here?

Potato Head, where you just give it a tail and new hands and Having spent a career shaking up paleontology, Horner seems perfectly happy with the idea that even And if Horner is right, do we get the joy of real dinosaurs menacing the San Diego suburbs? ‘Ultima’ Fandom Is Still Going Strong ... instead developing a broad, rounded snout," Bhullar said. There they found proof of crazy idea number one: The parents at the site cared for their young. Horner didn’t agree with this picture. Horner is the first to admit that he doesn’t know enough to do the work himself, so he’s actively seeking a developmental biology postdoctoral fellow to join his lab group in Montana. "These weren't drastic modifications," says Bhullar. “They just need the right signal to come through.”Where Harris—now on the faculty at Harvard Medical School—saw an interesting bit of developmental biology, Horner saw yet another stepping stone to his dinosaur. Genetically modified food is a hot issue. Therefore, the fact that these chickens possess the genetic potential to grow teeth offered further validation to this theory.

The accidental discovery revealed that chickens retain the ability to grow teeth, even though birds lost this feature long ago.