Jack Horner's How to build a Dinosaur

We may someday recover bits of dinosaur DNA, but that is not the route to making a Dinosaur. That has already been tried, in the movies. But it won't happen in real life. I'm not putting down the movies. I loved jurassic park, not least because I worked on it and the sequels as a technical consultant to help get the dinosaurs right. And the idea of cloning dinosaurs from DNA were covered from a mosquito preserved in Amber that once fed on dinosaurs was a brilliant fiction. It was, however, a fiction that reflected the science of its time, a fascination with DNA and the idea that we could have a complete blueprint of the dinosaur to make one. Now we are actually much closer to being able to create a dinosaur with out needed to recover ancient DNA.

The project is based on new research in evolutionary developmental biology (or evo-devo) into how a few cells grow to create arms, legs, eyes, and brains all functioning together, and how changes in that growth can drive evolution. Jack Horner takes the science a step further in a plan to "reverse evolution" and reveals the awesome, eve frightening power we are now acquiring to re-create the prehistoric past. The mystery ingredient in this creation is the genetic code for building dinosaurs that lives on in modern birds, even chickens. So how do you build a dinosaur? One way is to start with a simple chicken egg, and biochemically nudge the embryo this way and that until what hatches has a tail, teeth, and forearms instead of wings. Behold: Chickenosauraus.