The glaring similarities highlighted by Horner (2011) in his informative TED talk underscore the possibility of building dinosaurs from chicken. He posits that the most viable method of such a revolutionary feat would be to stimulate the development of ancestral characteristics that get lost during the embryonic stage of the avian dinosaurs. It has, so far, proven a challenge for scientists to acquire DNA from the million-year old fossils. However, evidence of collagen proteins found in a T.rex bone in 2007 was proven to have the same sequence as that found in chicken (Bryner, 2007). This revelation points to the idea that the DNA of these two species could have had a gene that uses protein in quite a similar manner. Labile lipids become unstable over long periods of time. Nevertheless, recent findings show that the phospholipids and hydrocarbon tails found in the embryos of avian dinosaurs have the same structures to the blood vessels of non-avian dinosaurs (Saitta et al., 2018). This revelation may be a starting point in evaluating how the two species used carbohydrates and lipids.
Atavism activation, a process that Horner describes in his video, prescribes a method of that traces some features of chickens back to their ancient cousins; these features manifest through the occasional conception of chicken with teeth, for example. Another instance of atavism is exhibited in the glaring similarities between the embryonic “hand” of a chicken and that of the Velociraptor. At some point in the embryo’s development the chicken’s gene merges the bones so that instead of three digits they morph into one fused “hand”. Scientists such as Honer and Dr. Hans Larsson, believe that through the manipulation of such genes they would be able to create an organism that is very much similar to the non-avian dinosaur.
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References
Bryner, J. (2007). T. Rex related to chickens. Retrieved from https://www.livescience.com/1410-rex-related-chickens.html
Horner, J. (2011). Building a dinosaur from a chicken [Video]. TED.
Saitta, E., Liang, R., Lau, C., Brown, C., Longrich, N., & Kaye, T. et al. (2018). Life inside a dinosaur bone: A thriving microbiome. The Pre-Print Server For Biology . doi: 10.1101/400176
