Bringing back the dinosaurs
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Transcript of Bringing back the dinosaurs
Bringing back the dinosaurs
By David Wong
Jurassic Park
• Michael Crichton imagined finding a prehistoric blood sucking insect preserved in amber.
• Bydrilling into the insect andremoving genetic material and cloning it they produced dinosaurs.
• Famous paleontologist Jack Horner said “if you got something out of that insect and cloned it you would have a roomful of mosquitoes”.
Go to the Dinosaur
• The only way to obtain dinosaur DNA is to find it in a dinosaur and extract it from the soft tissue.
• Mary Schweitzer found interesting structures in T-rex bones that resembled red blood cells.
• They turned out to be heme which is what hemoglobin is made of.
• But by studying the soft tissue they learned a lot about dinosaurs
• The main thing they learned was that dinosaur DNA decayed either long ago or almost immediately after the bone was opened up.
• So cloning a dinosaur isnot yet possible and probably never will be
• Jack Horner said that if you can’t clone a dinosaur build a dinosaur.
• Birds are technically living dinosaurs and are classified as avian dinosaurs (witch are modern birds)
• Since the chicken is a dinosaur we can fix the chicken to make it more like a non-avian dinosaur (witch are all the extinct dinosaurs)
Biological modification tools
• Selection: through selective breeding you can alter a species appearance over the course of several generations.
• Selection accounts for the many breeds of dogs
Transgenesis
• The process of transplanting genes from one organism to another
• Like these glowing rats have a jellyfish gene that allows a chemical reaction that causes them to glow
Atavism Activation • The modification of an organism by bringing
out existing ancestral genes that are no longer expressed and suppressing modern genes that are expressed.
• Dr Hans Larsson (McGill university) is looking for a way to turn off the gene that causes the embryonic chickens fingers to fuse in to wings.
• As well as the wing, the teeth, and the tail of the chicken can also be recovered
• By turning off the gene that suppresses the tail growth and stimulating the gene that forms teeth
In conclusion
• It is unlikely that we could clone a dinosaur from a mosquito or even from a dinosaurs tissues
• Genetically modifying a chicken is probably the only way we could make a dinosaur
• Atavism activation is the most efficient way to make a dinosaur-like creature
Works Cited • . "Evo-Devo." http://www.paleogenetics.com. http://www.paleogenetics.com/, n.d. Web. 16 Nov 2012.
<http://www.paleogenetics.com/evodevo.html>.• • Fields, Helen. "Smithsonian Magazine." Smithsonian Magazine. (2006): n. page. Web. 16 Nov. 2012.
<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html>.• • Horner, Jack. Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken. 2011. video. http://www.ted.com/Web. 16 Nov 2012.
• Inside the Bones. N.d. http://www.pbs.org/Web. 18 Nov 2012. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/schweitzer-bones.html>.
• Lee, Christopher. "The Washington Post ." Washington Post . (2007): n. page. Web. 16 Nov. 2012. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2007/12/03/ST2007120300591.html>.
• • Leishman, Ron. ROYALTY-FREE (RF) CLIP ART ILLUSTRATION OF A CARTOON WOMAN RUNNING FROM A SWARM OF
MOSQUITOES BY RON LEISHMAN . N.d. http://www.clipartof.com/Web. 16 Nov 2012. <http://www.clipartof.com/portfolio/toonaday/illustration/cartoon-woman-running-from-a-swarm-of-mosquitoes-1044562.html>.
• N.d. http://www.petrifiedhumanbrain.com/Web. 18 Nov 2012. <http://www.petrifiedhumanbrain.com/microscopic.html>.