You might recall our story from a few years ago, describing what was then referred to as "Dinochicken." To recap, Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, told me that he and some colleagues were working to create a dinosaur out of a chicken.
The goal is to bring back multiple dinosaur characteristics, such as a tail, teeth and forearms, by changing the levels of regulatory proteins that have evolved to suppress these characteristics in modern birds.
"Birds are dinosaurs, so technically we're making a dinosaur out of a dinosaur," Horner explained to me. "The only reason we're using chickens, instead of some other bird, is that the chicken genome has been mapped, and chickens have already been exhaustively studied.""
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