Scientists say they can reconstruct living dinosaurs within 5 years

Dinosaurs may soon return to real life, for the paleontologist who inspired Michael Crichton to shoot the original film "Jurassic Park" announced a research project on the return to life of extinct creatures. Dr. Jack Horner says scientists need only 5-10 years to reconstruct living dinosaurs.

Horner works with scientists from Harvard and Yale, looking for the closest living relatives of dinosaurs in the hope of changing them. “Of course, birds are dinosaurs,” said Horner. "So we just need to change them so that they look like dinosaurs."





Horner and his group will start with the modern hen, recognized as a direct descendant of the massive lizards that once ruled the Earth. Horner advised all four films of the Jurassic Park. In the behind-the-scenes interview from the first film, writer Michael Crichton confessed that his hero, Dr. Alan Grant, was a mixture of Horner and Philip J. Kerry.



The 71-year-old paleontologist said that when he first began working on films, he believed that dinosaurs would be returned in the same way as in the film - through the preserved pieces of their DNA taken from fossils. However, since then, he and his colleagues have begun to better understand how DNA is being destroyed, and decided that this is not the way they need to go.

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According to Horner, chicken and many other modern birds have many common genes with dinosaurs. He believes that they will be able to manipulate them in order to reverse the evolutionary process - initiating changes that will express more and more ancient characteristics.

“Dinosaurs had long tails, limbs and hands - and as a result of evolution, they lost their tails, and limbs and hands turned into wings,” Horner explained to reporters. “In addition, the whole morphology of their mouths changed from a velociraptor-like shape to a bird's beak.” Horner believes that his work will determine how to click the gene switch "so that we return these hereditary characteristics."

Horner called the 2015 study his "proof of concept" , noting that scientists from Harvard and Yale were able to turn the bird's head into a dinosaur's face.

“In essence, we are using a germ that is just beginning to form, and we are using some genetic markers to identify when the right genes are turned on and off,” he said. “And by determining when the right genes are included, we can figure out how the tail begins to develop. And we want to correct these genes so that they do not prevent the tail from growing. ”

Horner is confident that some form of the lizard, which he called the "chicken chow", will walk on the ground in 10 years.



“We can grow a bird with teeth, and we can change its mouth,” he said. “In fact, the wings and hands are not so complicated. We are confident that we will be able to do this in the near future. ”



The project, however, is not an easy task, and Horner noted that “the tail is the biggest problem. But on the other hand, recently we were able to do some things that instilled in us hope that it would not take too much time. ”