TED 2011: Hatching Dinosaurs, One Egg at a Time

Wired: TED 2011: Hatching Dinosaurs, One Egg at a Time

LONG BEACH, California — You know the scene in Jurassic Park. Sam Neil’s character Dr. Alan Grant and a group of naïve visitors enter the dinosaur island’s birthing lab just at the moment a large egg begins to wobble and crack. The determined creature inside pecks its way out of the shell, and suddenly a velociraptor is born – more than 70 million years after its species was supposed to have become extinct.

Only in the movies, right?

Not if you’re paleontologist Jack Horner, the inspiration for Neil’s character, who is on a mission to bring dinosaurs back – or at least the modern-day version of one.

Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies and regent’s professor at Montana State University, has been working with researchers to produce a dino-chicken or chickensaurus — a chicken with prehistoric features such as a tail and hands. The research has been featured on 60 Minutes and elsewhere.

Chickens, and other birds, are descendants of dinosaurs and carry the dino DNA. In the embryo stage, chickens actually have a tail, which disappears before the bird hatches. Horner believes that if researchers can find the gene that turns off the tail — and turn it back on — they can hatch a chicken that resembles a dinosaur.

Horner will be speaking about his work at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference on Friday. He talked about his dino project with Wired.com in advance of his presentation.

Wired.com: Why did you choose a chicken for your experiment and not an ostrich or some other bird? Is there a reason a chicken is more suitable?

Jack Horner: They’re easier to come by. Ostriches cost a lot of money. That really is the only reason. And the generation time is quicker. A chicken grows up in a little less time than an ostrich. An ostrich takes a whole year. A chicken takes a few months. You’d probably be better off using a smaller bird, but there gets to be some logistical problems with them. You can go and get plenty of eggs of chickens, but it’s pretty hard to go and get plenty of eggs of robins.