Building a dinosaur from a chicken Jack Horner

[Music]

[Applause]

when I was growing up in Montana I had

two dreams I wanted to be a

paleontologist a dinosaur

paleontologists and I wanted to have a

pet dinosaur and so that’s what I’ve

been striving for all of my life I was

very fortunate early in my career I was

fortunate in finding things I wasn’t

very good at reading things in fact I

don’t read much of anything

I am extremely dyslexic and so reading

is the hardest thing I do but instead I

go out and I find things now I just pick

things up I basically you know practice

for finding money on the street and I

wander about the hills and and I have

found a few things and I have been

fortunate enough to find things like the

first eggs in the Western Hemisphere and

the first baby dinosaurs in nests and

the first dinosaur embryos and massive

accumulations of bones and it happened

to be at a time when people were

starting to begin to realize that

dinosaurs weren’t the big stupid green

reptiles of that people had thought to

so many years and people were starting

to get an idea that dinosaurs were

special and so at that time I was able

to make some interesting hypotheses

along with my colleagues we were able to

actually say that dinosaurs based on the

evidence we had that dinosaurs built

nests and lived in colonies and cared

for their young brought food to their

babies and traveled in gigantic herds so

it was it was pretty interesting stuff I

have gone on to find more things and and

discover that that dinosaurs really were

very social we have found

a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed

from when they are juveniles to when

they’re adults the appearance of them

would have been different which it is in

all social animals in social groups of

animals the juveniles always look

different than the adults the adults can

recognize the juveniles the juveniles

can recognize the adults and so we’re

making a better picture of what a

dinosaur look like and they didn’t just

all chase jeeps around

but it is that social thing that that I

guess attracted michael crichton in his

book he talked about the social animals

and then Steven Spielberg of course

depicts these dinosaurs as being very

social creatures the theme of this story

is building a dinosaur and so we come to

that part of Jurassic Park this is you

know Michael Crichton really was one of

the first people to talk about bringing

dinosaurs back to life you all know the

story right I mean I assume everyone

here has seen Jurassic Park if you want

to make a dinosaur you go out you find

yourself a piece of petrified tree sap

otherwise known as amber that has some

blood sucking insects in it good ones

and you get your insect you drill into

it and you suck out some DNA because

obviously all insects that suck blood in

those days suck dinosaur DNA out and and

you take your DNA back to the laboratory

and clone it and I guess you inject it

into maybe an ostrich egg or something

like that and then you wait and lo and

behold out pops a little baby dinosaur

and everybody’s happy about that

and they’re happy over and over again

they keep doing it they just keep making

these things and and then they then then

and then you know then the dinosaurs

being social act out their social

niskanen and of course that’s what makes

Steven Spielberg’s movie conspiring

dinosaurs chasing people around I assume

everybody knows that if you actually had

a piece of amber and it had an insect in

it and you drilled into it and you got

something out of that insect and you

cloned it and you did it over and over

and over again you’d have a room full of

mosquitoes right

or maybes and probably a whole bunch of

trees as well now if you want dinosaur

DNA I say go to the dinosaur so that’s

what we’ve done back in 1993 when the

movie came out we actually had a grant

from the National Science Foundation to

attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur

and we chose the dinosaur on the left a

Tyrannosaurus Rex which was a very nice

specimen and one of my former doctoral

students dr. Mary Schweitzer actually

had the background to do this sort of

thing and so she looked into the bone of

this t-rex one of the thigh bones and

she actually found some very interesting

structures in there they found these red

circular looking objects and they looked

for all the world like red blood cells

and they’re in what appeared to be the

blood channels that go through the bone

and so she thought well what the heck so

she sampled some material out of it and

it wasn’t DNA she didn’t find DNA but

she did find theme which is the

biological foundation of hemoglobin when

that was really cool that was

interesting I mean that was here we have

65 million year old heme well we tried

and tried and couldn’t really get

anything else out of it so a few years

went by and then we started the Hell

Creek project and how Creek project was

this massive undertaking to get as many

dinosaurs as we could possibly find and

hopefully find some dinosaurs that had

more material in them and out in eastern

Montana there’s a lot of space a lot of

Badlands and not very many people and so

you can go out there and find a lot of

stuff and we did find a lot of stuff we

found a lot of tyrannosaurs but we found

one special Tyrannosaur and we called it

beer ax and B Rex was found under a

thousand cubic yards of rock it wasn’t a

very complete t-rex and it wasn’t a very

big t-rex but it was a very special beer

X I and my colleagues cut it in two

and we were able to determine by looking

at lines of rested growth two lines in

it that B Rex had died at the age of

sixteen we don’t really know how long

dinosaurs live because we haven’t found

the oldest one yet but this one died at

the age of sixteen

we gave samples to Mary Schweitzer and

she was actually able to determine that

B Rex was a female based on medullary

tissue found on the inside of the bone

medullary tissue is a calcium build up

the calcium storage basically when an

animal is pregnant when a bird is

pregnant so here was a character that

linked birds and dinosaurs but Mary went

further she took the bone and she dumped

it into acid now we all know that bones

are fossilized and so if you dump it

into acid there shouldn’t be anything

left but there was something left there

were blood vessels left there were

flexible clear blood vessels and so here

was the first soft tissues from a

dinosaur was extraordinary but she also

found osteocytes which are the cells

that laid down the bones and try and try

we could not find DNA but she did find

evidence of proteins but we thought

maybe well we thought maybe that the

material was breaking down after it was

coming out of the ground we thought

maybe was deteriorating very fast and so

we built a laboratory in the back of an

18-wheeler trailer it actually took the

laboratory to the field where we could

get better samples and we did we got

better material the cells look better

the vessels look better found the

protein collagen I mean it it was

wonderful stuff but it’s not dinosaur

DNA so we have discovered that dinosaur

DNA and all DNA just breaks down too

fast we’re just not going to be able to

do what they did in Jurassic Park we’re

not going to be able to make a dinosaur

based on

a dinosaur but birds are dinosaurs birds

are living dinosaurs we actually

classify them as dinosaurs we now call

them non-avian dinosaurs and avian

dinosaurs so the non-avian dinosaurs are

the big clunky ones that went extinct

avian dinosaurs are our modern burns so

we don’t have to make a dinosaur so I

already have them

[Music]

I know your your your bad as the sixth

graders right the sixth graders look at

and they say no you can call it you can

call it a dinosaur but look at the

Velociraptor the Velociraptor is cool

the chicken is not so this is our

problem as you can imagine the chicken

is a dinosaur I mean it really is I mean

you you can’t argue with it because we

you know we’re the classifiers and we

classified it that way but the sixth

graders demand it fix the chicken so so

that’s what I’m here to tell you about

how we’re going to fix a chicken so we

have a number of of ways that we

actually can fix the chicken because

evolution works we actually have some

evolutionary tools we’ll call them

biological modification tools we have

selection and we know selection works

right I mean we started out with a

wolf-like creature and we end up with a

Maltese I mean that’s that’s that’s

definitely genetic modification

or any of the other funny-looking little

dogs we also have transgenesis

transgenesis is really cool too that’s

where you take a gene out of one animal

and stick it in another one that’s how

we you know that’s how people make

Blowfish you take a gene agloe gene out

of a out of a plural or or a jellyfish

and you stick it in a zebrafish and big

whoa and you know that’s pretty cool and

they obviously make a lot of money off

of and now they’re you know they’re

making go rabbits and do all sorts of

thing I guess we could make a glow

chicken but I don’t think that’ll

satisfy the sixth graders either but

there’s another thing there’s what we

call atavism activation and atom ISM

activation is basically an atavism is up

is an ancestral characteristic yeah you

you’ve heard that occasionally children

are born with tails and it’s because

it’s an ancestral characteristic and so

there are a number of atavisms that can

happen

snakes are occasionally born with legs

and here’s an example this is chicken

with teeth a fellow by the name of

Matthew Harris at the University of

Wisconsin and Madison

actually figured out a way to stimulate

the gene of teeth for teeth and so was

able to actually turn the tooth gene on

and produce teeth in in chickens which

now that’s a good characteristic we can

we can save that one all right we know

we can use that we can make a chicken

with teeth

that’s getting closer that’s better than

a glowing chicken a friend of mine a

colleague of mine dr. Hans Larsson at

McGill University is actually looking at

out of ism’s and he’s looking at them by

looking at the embryogenesis of birds

and actually looking at how they develop

and he’s interested in how birds

actually lost their tail he’s also

interested in the transformation of the

arm the hand to the wing he’s looking

for those genes as well and I said well

you know if you can find those I can

just reverse them and make what I need

to make for the sixth-graders

and so he agreed and so that’s what

we’re looking into if you look at

dinosaur hands Velociraptor has that

cool-looking hand with the claws on it

Archaeopteryx which is a bird a

primitive bird still has that very

primitive hand but as you can see the

pigeon or a chicken or anything else so

like a bird has kind of a weird-looking

hand because the hand is a wing but the

cool thing is instead if you look in the

embryo as the embryo is developing the

hand actually looks pretty much like the

Archaeopteryx hand it has the three

fingers and three digits but a gene

turns on that actually fuses those

together and so what we’re looking for

is that gene we want to stop that gene

from turning on fusing those hands

together so we can get a chicken that

hatches out with a three fingered hand

it’s like the Archaeopteryx and the same

goes for the tails birds have basically

rudimentary tails and so we know that in

embryo as the animal is developing it

actually has a relatively long tail but

a gene turns on and resorbs the tail

gets rid of it so that’s the other gene

we’re looking for we want to stop that

tail from resorbing so what we’re trying

to do really is take our chicken modify

it

and make a chickenosaurus it’s a cooler

looking chicken I mean but it’s just the

very basics so that really is what we’re

doing and people always say well you

know why do that why make this thing

what good is it well that’s a good

question you know actually I think it’s

a great way to teach kids about

evolutionary biology and developmental

biology and all sorts of things and

right frankly I think if if Colonel

Sanders was to be careful how he worded

if he could actually advertise an extra

piece

anyway

when our Dino chicken hatches it will be

obviously the poster child or what you

might call a poster check for technology

entertainment and design thank you

[Applause]