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Dinosaurs: Return to Life

The Beasts are Back! Discovery Channel Presents the Premiere of Dinosaurs: Return to Life, Feb. 17

Today's scientists are recreating dinosaurs through genetic engineering. Sounds like science fiction? Not any longer.

Premiering Sun., Feb. 17 at 9 p.m. ET/10 p.m. PT, Discovery Channel presents the premiere of Dinosaurs: Return to Life, a startling one-hour special that virtually turns back the clock to the Jurassic period and recreates the dinosaurs that ruled the planet 200 million years ago. Through rapid advances in genetics, scientists are discovering the genetic traits of dinosaurs in the DNA of birds. They are showing that it is possible to bring back teeth, long tails and hands in place of wings. In Dinosaurs: Return to Life, learn why the dream of recreating the dinosaur genome is coming closer to reality.

Dinosaurs: Return to Life follows an encore presentation of Mammals Vs. Dinosaurs: Rise of the Mammals at 8 p.m. ET/9 p.m. PT. This International Emmy® Award-nominated special chronicles the evolutionary battle between mammals and dinosaurs. On the dinosaur side, discoveries reveal that the great beasts were social animals living and hunting in packs; while other species evolved into bird-like animals with the sky as their domain.

Mammals on the other hand, with greater adaptability, prospered despite their small size. A shorter life span allows for faster evolutionary changes and that led to new species that could adjust to a changing world. In the end, mammals' flexibility and variety ensured their survival. Ultimately, dinosaurs were defeated, not by mammals, but by a huge meteor collision with Earth 65 millions of years ago. Dinosaurs couldn't adjust to the radically changed world and mammals began their rise to the top.

In 38 minutes!

is there gonna be a replay?

2/18 1 AM

Very interesting experiments with the chicken eggs. It seems everything to create a dinosaur is with us but just needs a trigger. The future should be pretty amazing.

So it's not 'recreating dinosaurs' as such, but genetically enigineering birds to have dinosaur-like characteristics.

Exactly. They have almost given up the idea of creating a dinosaur from dinosaur DNA since it's pretty much non-existant. DNA is very weak and it will be destroyed in a few million years after the death of the animal.

What they have found is that birds still carry the blue-prints of dinosaurs. The genes that made a dinosaur are still present in birds, but they are suppressed or they have a different function in today's world. They have found that new genes are not created from specie to specie, but that old genes are taught new tricks.

The gene for a tail is present on birds, the gene for teeth is present on birds, the gene for scale instread of feathers is present in birds. Everything is already present on birds, you just need to retro-engineered.

The problem is trying to create a dinosaur from scratch. It will take years and a lot of money of trial and error.

You would probably start with an Emu:


Look at the Emu's feet:


T-Rex feet:


In theory you could end up with something like this bird-like dinosaur:


Therefore, what they are trying to do is taking a normal bird and bing back dinosaur characteristics. This may happen in the next 50 years since we already know the genome of a bird. Do minor changes, and in theory, a dinosaur-like bird is born.

Very cool!!!!

The tail of a chicken embryo reveals 16 vertebrae in “Dinosaurs: Return to Life,” airing Sunday on Discovery.

Scientists hope to reverse-engineer a chicken into a dinosaur

Chicken equals dinosaur.

It's a once-controversial theory, now accepted in the scientific world. Viewers can explore that world in "Dinosaurs: Return to Life," airing Sunday.

The documentary starts with a premise first hypothesized in Michael Crichton's sci-fi thriller "Jurassic Park": DNA could be extracted from a millions-of-years-old insect encased in ancient amber and used to clone dinosaurs.

It made for a great movie, but in order to turn fiction into fact, scientists would have to find intact dino DNA -- something that hasn't happened yet.

What takes place in the documentary is rather the reverse. Scientists take a modern animal, such as a chicken, and try to trace its ancestral genes back to the dinosaur.

It's a field called "EvoDevo," short for evolutionary development, according to paleontologist Jack Horner, who served as an adviser on the film.

"A lot of paleontologists are getting into this now," said Horner, professor of paleontology at Montana State University and curator of paleontology for the Museum of the Rockies. "It's trying to figure out how the evolutionary process works, how organisms went through the evolutionary process to get to the state they are in right now. (It's) how dinosaurs gave rise to birds."

Technologies used in genetics show that "ancient traits that once belonged to dinosaurs" are being found in birds, including the ability to grow teeth, multi-vertebrated tails, scales and hands, according to the film.

"So all you have to do is find the genetic switches that fuse the vertebrae together, and fuse the hand to make a wing. It's even simpler than real genetic engineering."

But, "you can't retro-engineer a bird and get a dinosaur unless the dinosaur characteristics are already there," Horner said in a recent phone interview from his office in Bozeman, Mont.

His theory hinges on something called genetic memory.

Hans Larsson, a paleontologist at McGill University featured in the film, is searching for genetic switches that turned long-tailed dinos into short-tailed birds during the last 150 million years.

By studying a 1 1/2-days-old chicken embryo, he finds up to 16 vertebrae. An adult chicken only has four to eight. The embryo, he discovers, "has a tail almost as long as an Archaeopteryx, the first bird and a transitional animal between dinosaurs and birds."

"He's trying to figure out how the process works, how a dinosaur loses a tail and has its hand transformed into the wing of a bird," said Horner, who found his first dinosaur bone as a 6-year-old.

"My interest is in . . . taking the bird and seeing if we can start up some of that genetic machinery to produce a tail. If evolution works, then it should be possible -- without adding anything to the bird -- to turn on the right (genetic) switches."

Horner's theory is that the animal most like a "velociraptor-sized dinosaur" is an emu. They are the same size, both share a three-toed foot and the emu's feathers are similar to impressions of those found on dinosaurs in China.

"If we were going to make a dinosaur, I'd start with this guy," he says in the film. Like dinosaurs, the birds also tend to their eggs, flock together and care for their young.

He believes creating a dino-like creature from a bird will be possible in the next 50 years.

"You know, I have to admit that I've certainly imagined walking on stage to give a talk and having a little dino-chicken, or whatever you want to call him, walk up behind me," he says in the film.

"That would be kind of cool."

Many consider that birds are already dinosaurs-the small ones that survived the K-T extinction.

Steve

Ptarmigans are dinosaurs.

These findings will really set off the creationists.

gtalum wrote:These findings will really set off the creationists.

Except that it's pure science and not science fiction.