JACK HORNER
Jurassic Park’s scientific advisor has plans to make a pet dinosaur
Horner is the real palaeontologist who inspired the character of Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. Since finding his first dinosaur bone at the age of eight, Horner has dug up the first dinosaur embryos, the first dinosaur eggs in the Western world and has discovered and named the dinosaur species ‘Maiasaura’. During his time as the palaeontology consultant for the Jurassic
Park films, Horner advised Steven Spielberg on how to make the portrayal of dinosaurs as realistic as possible. While he deems the cloning process pure fiction, this hasn’t stopped Horner from trying to bring back the dinosaurs
How would a Jurassic Park need to be changed in real life?
If you really, seriously want to build a Jurassic Park and are not just making a movie, you want walls around the dinosaurs to keep them in. Reinforced concrete is going to work a lot better than electric fences, because electricity can go out. Electric fences were not a very good idea.
In reality, could any of the cloning processes seen in the film work?
We think we have found signals for DNA and that
A prehistoric insect preserved in amber there might be tiny bits left, but not enough to use to make a dinosaur. We can get collagen and some dinosaur proteins, but not all the material we need. If we had the DNA, it would be ridiculous to put it in an ostrich egg. The thing to do would be to grow it in a test tube, because we have no idea how big the embryos of all dinosaurs are. Some dinosaur eggs are the size of ostrich eggs, but for a Tyrannosaur, we think they are a lot longer and they’re bigger. It’s like thinking about putting a human embryo inside a squirrel. If we’re going to make a dinosaur, it’s not going to be in the same way as Jurassic Park. That doesn’t mean we can’t make one. I actually have a laboratory where we are attempting to figure out how to make a dinosaur.
How are you trying to create a dinosaur?
It’s called the dino-chicken project, and it’s mostly based on genetic engineering. The idea is to use atavistic genes. They are basically ancestral genes, meaning that ancestral animals programmed certain features. For instance, occasionally children are born with extra vertebrae and form a low tail, which the doctor just picks off when the child is born. And every once in a while snakes are born with little appendages. Whales evolved from land animals, and occasionally they are born with extra limbs sticking out the side of themselves. These are atavistic genes. They were useful at one time, but through the course of evolution they have been turned off. Occasionally they are accidentally turned back on, and snakes get a set of legs.
I was hoping that some of the features of a dinosaur were atavistic in a bird. All bird species are related to one another, with one common ancestor – dinosaurs – so any bird should work. Chickens are the easiest thing to get eggs from, so I built a laboratory, hired some geneticists and developmental biologists and started seeing if we could find some of these potential atavistic genes.
Why did you start this project?
I’d like to have a pet dinosaur. Wouldn’t everybody like to have a pet dinosaur? I have a pet bird, but that’s the closest I can get right now. When I started the project, everybody thought it was just crazy. But then, after a little while, other laboratories started working on it, like Yale University and Mcgill University, and they started finding some atavistic genes. We’ve been working on the tail, mostly, because that seems to be the hardest part.
Is your method working?
We discovered that the reduction of the tail from long-tail dinosaur to a short-tail bird is not an atavistic gene. We are trying to figure out how the tail actually works and reverse the process that formed the short tail. Other laboratories have looked at the face, teeth, arms and hands. I think we can do pretty much all the rest of the body. We have the potential of making an animal that has a dinosaur-like head, probably with teeth in it, and we certainly have the capability of reversing the wings to make arms and hands. We know we can do that, but right now we’re just trying to fix the tail.
If you succeed, would you make something similar to a Jurassic Park?
That’s a whole different thing. People always say, ‘where are you going to put these dinosaurs when you make them’, and I always say that many thousands of years ago we started with wolves, and now we have Chihuahuas. Dogs are basically wolves, and we don’t really have to contain them. I wouldn’t expect dino-chickens to be the same as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. They’re going to be domestic animals that we don’t have to worry about. If you were cloning a real Tyrannosaur, you would have to worry about containing them. Dogs and cats were wild, but now we don’t have to contain them – not to the point of making a park anyway.
“WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE A DINOSAUR”