Scientists making progress towards dino-chicken

20 May 2015 - 13:02 By Times LIVE
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Image: Gallo Images/Thinkstock

Scientists are about half way towards successfully reverting a chicken towards being a dinosaur according to a report.

Researchers lit up the scientific world last week when they managed to revert the beak of a chicken embryo to resemble the snout of its dinosaur ancestor

According to their research, which was published in the journal Evolution, the scientists first looked at the fossil record to figure out what the ancestral snout was supposed to look like.

They then looked at the genes of the birds, to try and see what could have changed the snout into a beak, then injecting inhibitors for those genes into the embryos, producing those old snouts.

However a beak is just one step in the direction of making dino-chickens, there are still issues like the arms and tail to go at - so how far off are they really?

Livescience asked a professor of Palentology - who says we're about halfway to being able to enjoy Kentucky Fried Dinos (After all we have known since 1987 that dinosaurs are supposed to get on the floor. They may also go with chakalaka).

"From a quantitative point of view, we're 50 percent there," said Jack Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University and a curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.

Horner apparently wants to raise a live dino-chicken.

"This dino-chicken project — we can liken it to the moon project," Horner told Live Science. "We know we can do it; it's just there are … some huge hurdles."

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