The Lost World: Found

Any one that knows me will know that I am a nut for dinosaurs and other prehistoric life.

And anyone that know that, and has enough knowledge of the subject to engage me in debate will know that I have been staunchly reluctant to accept that dinosaurs evolved into bird even though there is evidence to prove otherwise all be it sparse and fragmented. I have accepted the school of thought however an not dismissed the notion that a group as diverse as dinosaurs, could contain a species that had the potential to evolve into a group as diverse as birds.

This post is dedicated to the Naturalist Charles Darwin who would be celebrating his 200^th birthday this month. His ground breaking theory of evolution by natural section is the reason why we don't all look the same and why a lot of us are more than just a couple of microns in diameter.

This post is not a rant as to why birds are not dinosaurs. Actually I would like to announce that I am now thoroughly convinced that birds do have a dinosaurian ancestry. This post is not about that either.

How close do you think we are to recreating them? Dinosaurs I mean. You know, bringing them back to life.

The answer is very close and I'm not talking about going the whole insects trapped in amber route.

It is unfortunately not common knowledge that there are more animals that have had it's genome mapped than just humans. There is a myriad of plants, animals, fungi and even viruses with genomes mapped. The chimpanzee, the brown rat, the platypus, brewers yeast (which was the first genome to be mapped) and the Chicken. A bird. A descendant from from dinosaurs perhaps. Still I was unconvinced at this point. However I had heard of reverse engineering before.

Reverse engineering is when you search the genome for genes that are still present in the DNA strand from a previous incarnation. So in theory you could find the very single celled life form that everything evolved from. Which fascinates me a lot.

Well they did this with a chicken. They actually did this, not are doing, or even thinking about doing. They did it.

Scientists took a chickens embryo and using proteins, reactivated genes for tail growth. Knowing that chickens only have a small number of bones in its tail, you could understand the astonishment to the geneticists to find that not only the tail was nearly three times as long but contained new bones too. The embryo had made a tail from memory as if it had never not had one.

Next they tried to create teeth in the jaws, using the same technique, success here too. With gene sequencing technology in its adolescence at the moment it will not be long before mankind could revive a small therapod.

This causes an ethical debate, which is the fluffiest sort of debate because no one is really wrong.

Since the discovery of the first dinosaurs in England during the early nineteenth century scientists and the general populous has been hungry for knowledge of these monsters. So to recreate one would answer a lot of the questions, but not. The animal would only react to our environment not the environment of over sixty five million years ago, it could only consume today's prey. It could not behave the exactly the same.

Another great character who liked to dress all in black and talk about the ethics of bringing dinosaurs back to life was Dr Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park books and movies.

He made a very impressive speech round the dining table in the 1993 movie Jurassic park, which is one of the most profound things I have ever heard to date, granted it was lost on the majority of the audience who went to see monsters chase people, and only giggled “he said rape.” in response.

I urge you all to revisit this movie and especially this scene.

I would love to have questions about dinosaurs answering once and for all.

What colour were they? Did they have feathers? Were they, what we call warm blooded?

One of my own what did they taste like? Chicken?

For Charles Darwin.