With a sparkle in his eye, paleontologist Jack Horner’s TED Talk just went online.
It is quite engaging, with a recap of dinosaur creation efforts, from DNA extraction to atavism activation in modern birds.
By turning to the silenced, subsumed (ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny) and mutated genes within the common chicken, he is reversing the evolutionary march, so that a chicken could hatch its distant dino predecessor.
So which came first, the chicken or the dino egg?
“Birds are living dinosaurs. We actually classify them as dinosaurs. We call them avian dinosaurs, our modern birds. We don’t have to make a dinosaur. We already have them.
But the 6th grader says ‘No. The velociraptor is cool; the chicken is not.’
The 6th grader demands it. Fix the chicken! So… we are going to fix the chicken.
When our dinochicken hatches it will obviously be the poster child for Technology, Entertainment and Design.”
I first heard of this approach from Nathan Myhrvold three years ago. He wants to show up at a paleontology conference and surprise everyone by strutting a living dinosaur out onto the stage.
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