Stupid clucking question: which came first the chicken or the dinosaur?

By Davey Winder
Friday, 06 March 2009 19:21

Science - Biology

You might think that the world's leading paleontologists had better things to do than reverse engineer a chicken, but you would be wrong.

Yes, as strange as it may seem, the fact is that a bunch of paleontologists are attempting to reverse engineer a chicken embryo until they arrive at what you might call a chickenosaurus.

You might even call it a dinochicken, as that is what it has been referred to by the man in charge of the bizarre project, professor of paleontology at Montana State University, Jack Horner.

Speaking to Discovery News, Horner said that the only reason they were using a chicken instead of some other type of bird was that "the chicken genome has been mapped, and chickens have already been exhaustively studied."

Indeed, according to Horner birds are dinosaurs anyway so there is nothing particularly odd about trying to turn a dinosaur into a dinosaur. Well, not when you have a book to sell I guess. The professor is co-author of a book called "How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever."

This is not the first time boffins have attempted to reverse engineer nature though. In fact some have been pretty successful at it. Both mice and flies have got the reverse evolution treatment in the past.

The difference being that the dinochicken is being approached with a view to re-introducing not just a couple of ancient traits as with the mice and flies experiments, but rather a whole brood, clutch, run, peep or flock of them.

Horner and his colleagues are attempting to produce a chicken with multiple dinosaur characteristics including tail and teeth, apparently. The key being to change regulatory protein levels that have suppressed them as birds have evolved.

Although the thought of a chickenosaurus might fill those thinking in terms of solving the world food crisis with joy, the paleontologists have other things on their minds. Promoting growth of a dinosaur tail might help with spinal cord defects in humans for example.

Shame, I quite liked the idea of a giant chicken, although I would need a hand with the sage and onion stuffing.