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]