Post by brett0007 on Jul 29, 2015 7:55:50 GMT -5
If you cant fuck with Dinosaur DNA fuck with there grandkids DNA
First things first birds are dinosaurs. To understand why need to look at cladistics, the classification system used by biologists to classify life. Cladistics basically works like a family tree you have the common ancestor of a specific group and all its descendants. to put it into context humans form a clade with the great apes which are themselves in the clade of the old world primates which are a clade in primates. so they essentially work like Russian dolls nestled in ever bigger groups sharing common ancestors going up until you encapsulate all life. This does not mean to say that mammals and reptiles are classified as fish, that's not really useful. so distinctions are made based on traits like say arms and legs instead of fins and the ability to excursively breath air with lungs. when you apply this with dinosaurs and birds there are no traits exclusive to birds that traditional dinosaurs did not have.
A beak? That makes triceratops a bird. Pennaceous* feathers? that makes Velociraptor a bird. Wishbone? That makes T rex a bird. flight? that makes an Ostrich a dinosaur.
Simply put there is nothing exclusive to birds that dinosaurs didn't also have. Birds are literal living Theropod** dinosaurs. What that means is we don't need to find dinosaur dna out of bones or mosquitos trapped in amber, We have it already in chickens. Why chickens? They have the best mapped genome of any bird.
The meat of of the subject, Toothed Raptorchickens. Genetic retro-engineering and you.
It may come as a surprise but the vast amount of DNA any animal carries in it's genome is effectively useless junk DNA that has no effect on on its development or day to day life.
its been long known that some of this junk DNA is old genes no longer used, and in race cases activates. humans with tails, dolphins with back legs, snakes with single legs. these rare activation's are called atavisms, one atavism in chickens in particular is teeth. these events are extremely, extremely rare. so much so that there is the phrase "chicken teeth" to mean rare. If chickens after 70 million years of evolution still even carry the genes to create teeth and dinosaur like snouts [1][2] The snout experiment is the most interesting here, if you can switch on genes that create dinosaur like ancestral traits you can reasonably activate a number of these traits one identified and create a reasonable
representation of a dinosaur. In conclusion a Jurassic park style zoo of genetically modified dinosaur like creatures is not only theoretically possible but feasible.
Finally i'm going to show you a video from an experiment done in 2014[3] using chickens(again) in an attempt to understand Theropod locomotion, the strapped tails to young chickens and raised them as if they had a Theropod tail, interestingly they took to it quite well, there posture looking more like a museum posed Theropod dinosaur skeleton than a chicken...
One last important distinction must be made any animal a process like this would create is not a true non avian dinosaur but an modern day imitation of what we think a dinosaur would have looked like in life. Essentially a scientifically accurate doppelganger of a dinosaur not an actual non avian dinosaur.
*modern bird feathers, a shafted feather with filaments coming out
**2 legged primarily meat eating dinosaurs, think T rex and Velociraptor
[1]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12684/abstract
[2]http://www.nature.com/news/dino-chickens-reveal-how-the-beak-was-born-1.17507
[3]http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088458
A beak? That makes triceratops a bird. Pennaceous* feathers? that makes Velociraptor a bird. Wishbone? That makes T rex a bird. flight? that makes an Ostrich a dinosaur.
Simply put there is nothing exclusive to birds that dinosaurs didn't also have. Birds are literal living Theropod** dinosaurs. What that means is we don't need to find dinosaur dna out of bones or mosquitos trapped in amber, We have it already in chickens. Why chickens? They have the best mapped genome of any bird.
The meat of of the subject, Toothed Raptorchickens. Genetic retro-engineering and you.
It may come as a surprise but the vast amount of DNA any animal carries in it's genome is effectively useless junk DNA that has no effect on on its development or day to day life.
its been long known that some of this junk DNA is old genes no longer used, and in race cases activates. humans with tails, dolphins with back legs, snakes with single legs. these rare activation's are called atavisms, one atavism in chickens in particular is teeth. these events are extremely, extremely rare. so much so that there is the phrase "chicken teeth" to mean rare. If chickens after 70 million years of evolution still even carry the genes to create teeth and dinosaur like snouts [1][2] The snout experiment is the most interesting here, if you can switch on genes that create dinosaur like ancestral traits you can reasonably activate a number of these traits one identified and create a reasonable
representation of a dinosaur. In conclusion a Jurassic park style zoo of genetically modified dinosaur like creatures is not only theoretically possible but feasible.
Finally i'm going to show you a video from an experiment done in 2014[3] using chickens(again) in an attempt to understand Theropod locomotion, the strapped tails to young chickens and raised them as if they had a Theropod tail, interestingly they took to it quite well, there posture looking more like a museum posed Theropod dinosaur skeleton than a chicken...
One last important distinction must be made any animal a process like this would create is not a true non avian dinosaur but an modern day imitation of what we think a dinosaur would have looked like in life. Essentially a scientifically accurate doppelganger of a dinosaur not an actual non avian dinosaur.
*modern bird feathers, a shafted feather with filaments coming out
**2 legged primarily meat eating dinosaurs, think T rex and Velociraptor
[1]http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.12684/abstract
[2]http://www.nature.com/news/dino-chickens-reveal-how-the-beak-was-born-1.17507
[3]http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0088458