'Dinochicken' Scheme Puts Evolution in Reverse

March 5, 2009 -- Some of the world's leading paleontologists are attempting to recreate a dinosaur -- or something a lot like a dinosaur -- by starting with a chicken embryo and working backward to engineer a "chickenosaurus" or "dinochicken," project leader Jack Horner told Discovery News.

See an interview with Jack Horner on the subject of retro-engineering dinosaurs.

Such "reverse evolution" has been successfully performed in mice and flies, but those studies focused on re-introducing just a few bygone traits. The dinochicken project instead has the goal of bringing back multiple dinosaur characteristics, such as a tail, teeth and forearms, by changing the levels of regulatory proteins that have evolved to suppress these characteristics in birds.

"Birds are dinosaurs, so technically we're making a dinosaur out of a dinosaur," said Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University and curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.

"The only reason we're using chickens, instead of some other bird, is that the chicken genome has been mapped, and chickens have already been exhaustively studied," added Horner.

WATCH VIDEO: Jack Horner Muses on Creating a Dinochicken

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He and colleague James Gorman, deputy science editor of The New York Times, have just co-authored a new book, "How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever," which describes the project in detail.

Although the plan seems more like a page out of the fictional "Jurassic Park," Horner assured it is real and is already underway.

"A number of people in a number of different places are moving forward with the project slowly and carefully," he said.

One such researcher is Hans Laarson of McGill University in Montreal. Laarson and his team are analyzing the genes involved in tail development and researching ways of manipulating chicken embryos in order to "awaken the dinosaur within."