Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

That ain’t nuthin compared to this scientist:

Chickens share a common ancestor with alligators and are descended from dinosaurs, raising the question of how they and other birds switched from snouts to beaks. Because chick and gator embryos start out looking strikingly similar, Abzhanov, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, suspected the key might be found in developing embryos. In his open-egg experiment he tweaked a few of the embryo’s genes to make them behave more like identical genes do in an alligator embryo.

…

Long term Abzhanov, dreams of turning chickens back into Maniraptora, small dinosaurs thought to have given rise to the 10,000 species of birds around today. Others have similar musings. Palaeontologist Jack Horner described the basic principles in a book he co-wrote with James Gorman, How to Build a Dinosaur (Dutton Books, 2009), and regularly speaks of a future “chickenosaurus”. “We are interested in finding a way to extend the tail and create a hand in the chicken,” Horner told New Scientist, but would not elaborate.

Literal reverse-engineering of birds back into dinosaurs?  I got slapped down by Sapphire and Steel for wanting to turn the clock back 10 years, but this guy wants to go back more than 65 million years.  Great Scott!