Bringing back the dinosaurs
Remember Jurassic Park? It could be a reality sooner than you think.
But instead of using dino DNA trapped in amber to bring the giant reptiles back, scientists are looking to meddle with the genes of its modern-day ancestor, the bird, to hatch them straight from the egg.
A fascinating, exciting and terrifying article at macleans.ca looks at the latest moves to create a 'chickenosaurus'.What has given evolutionary development biologists hope is the discovery that most creatures share the same genes.
Humans have chimps share 99 per cent, for instance.
And we share them with our ancestors too. It's just how we use these genes that makes us different.
So boffins reckon by tripping the right genetic switches, they can hatch out a dinosaur.
Sounds cool. And from what I remember from the films, humans and dinosaurs ended up living happily ever after... didn't they?
Weird Science Factoid: During your lifetime, you'll eat the equivalent weight of six elephants in food. Gut busting!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
