Jurassic consultant plans 'chickenosaurus'

From the Edmonton Sun: Jurassic consultant plans 'chickenosaurus'

Jack Horner is building his own living dinosaur, as a pet and as a legitimate science project. Creating what has been dubbed “the chickenosaurus” has not happened yet but Horner is confident it will as he continues his research.

Does this sound crazy? Maybe a little. Does this sound eccentric? A lot. Does it all seem rather exciting? Absolutely.

Horner is the famed Montana-born, American paleontologist Dr. John R. Horner. Based at the Museum of the Rockies, Horner is known in science circles for — among many significant breakthroughs — co-discovering the colonial nesting site of a new species he and research partner Bob Makela called maiasaura, or good mother lizard. One of Horner’s specialities is dinosaur behaviour. He has helped to radically change the science of paleontology and mainstream understanding of evolution and the age of dinosaurs.

Horner is known in popular entertainment as the science consultant to producer-director Steven Spielberg on the Jurassic Park franchise (Spielberg has indicated there will be a fourth instalment soon). Horner was the real-life role model for Sam Neill’s character, paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant. Meanwhile, Horner is currently working with the television series Terra Nova, also a Spielberg production. While he sighs over the fact the dinosaurs he consults on spend most of their time in the Jurassic Park movies and in Terry Nova chasing and eating people — something the scientist in him finds ridiculous and unrealistic, especially when the T-rex in the original Jurassic Park chews through metal to get at the human prey — he is proud his dino actors look more realistic each time out. Including getting more feathery and more colourful. Horner’s Hollywood connection also keeps him in the public eye, which helps in raising private funding for his research, not least the chickenosaurus project.

“If I’m going to raise private funds, then people have to know what I do,” Horner tells Sun Media.

My interview with Horner is timed with this week’s Blu-ray debut of Jurassic Park: Ultimate Trilogy. We talk movies and dinosaurs. Interesting enough for my other home entertainment story. But I find it impossible to ignore the chickenosaurus project.

First though, I amuse Horner when I tell him I am a bird watcher — and therefore a watcher of living dinosaurs. “That you are!” he says with a deep chuckle. Birds evolved from feathered dinosaurs. This is popularly accepted now as science fact (unless you are a creationist, in which case you should probably not read this article nor watch any of the Jurassic Park movies, and certainly not Terra Nova). But, at the time that the first Jurassic Park was released in 1993, bird ancestry was not widely appreciated by the public. Hence the scene in which Neill, as Dr. Alan Grant, explains it to snickering students at his Montana dig.

There is other good science in Jurassic Park, such as the introductory animation. Most of the dino behaviour, however, is just Hollywood invention that grew out of Michael Crichton’s fantastical novel. Also dubious is the notion that dino DNA can be extracted from insects trapped in amber. Doesn’t work at all, as Horner’s team has proven. Instead, to realize a boyhood dream of owning his own pet dinosaur, and to forward the legitimate science of paleontology, Horner and his chickenosaurus collaborators are exploring other avenues to create a living dinosaur out of the jungle fowl or domestic chicken.

“We have a lot of what we would call biological modification tools, ways of changing organisms,” Horner explains. “One that we’ve used for years is just selective breeding, and you could probably make a chickenosaurus doing just that. You could probably select the characters and get a long tail and hands instead of wings. But it would take a long time and I just don’t have that much time.” Horner is 65. “I would just as soon get it done.”

That leaves other more urgent biological modification tools to work with. “There are a couple of different ways you can do it,” Horner says. “You can either find the genes that extend the tail or find the atavistic genes that produce it. Or you can find the genes that absorb the tail during embryoic genesis. “So that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re looking for any one of them (the genes).”

Why?

Horner has been answering that question repeatedly ever since the chickenosaurus project was first made public. As a media-friendly scientist with a droll sense of humour, he has been playful, yet scientifically rigourous, about his answers.

“Well, first off, it would be cool,” Horner says with another booming laugh. “And I don’t think many people would argue with that, just left alone (to contemplate the notion).” That is the playful side of Horner.

“But, once it can be done, if you can re-activate ancestral characters, you’ve demonstrated that it had ancestors. And that is one of the proofs of evolution.” If those characters in the chicken, or jungle fowl, are shown to be traced back to dinosaurs, that would indeed be proof of this aspect of evolutionary science.

There are more why answers here, Horner says. “It certainly has an educational purpose, besides being cool, but it also has the potential for a lot of medical applications once we understand how these genes operate. So the ‘why’ depends (on the interests of the person engaging the project). One of these reasons has to be good for somebody.”

Keeping the funding for the chickenosaurus project 100 percent private, and not public, is important to Horner. It gives him the freedom to develop pure science for its own sake, with no strings attached.

“It’s hard to convince governments to spend money on something they don’t want to spend money on, because governments are made up of people and people have their opinions and politicians definitely have their opinions. If they happen to be a little more on the creationist side rather than on the science side, then they’re not going to put much money into it.

“But the nice thing is that all of the research that I’m doing — whether it be on dinosaur growth or behaviour or building a chickenosaurus — All the funding is coming from private donations.”