Karl Tate/LiveScience
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Dinosaur chicken illustration.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—Biological researchers in the United States once announced that they had modified the beak of an embryo chicken to resemble the snout of its dinosaur ancestors. Although some experts praise the feat, the beak is just one of many modification required to return one chicken to form like dinosaur again.
With so many challenges, how close are scientists to creating a dino-chicken?
“From a quantitative point of view, we’re up to 50 percent,” said Jack Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University and curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.
Horner has long supported the idea of modifying chicken to look like dinosaur. He even actually wanted to nurture chicken life.
There are four modification needed to make an animal called a chickenosaurus, Horner said. To change a chicken be an animal like dinosaur, scientists had to give him teeth and a long tail, and return his wings to arms and hands.
The creature also needed a modified mouth. This is an achievement that has been achieved by the researchers who carried out the study, he said.
“This dino-chicken project—we can think of it as a lunar project,” Horner said Live Science. “We know we can do it; it’s just that there are … some big hurdles.”
One of those “big hurdles” has been solved in a study ever published in a journal Evolution on May 12, 2015. In that study the researchers changed the beaks of chicken be a muzzle dinosaur.
That seemingly small step took seven years of work. First, the researchers studied beak development in embryos chicken and emu, and snout development in turtle, crocodile, and lizard embryos.
Also Read: For the first time, scientists find fossilized eggs containing baby dinosaurs
John Conway
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Comparison between avian-like dinosaurs and modern birds.
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Probably millions of years ago, birds and reptiles had a similar developmental pathway that gave them snouts. But over time, molecular changes led to beak development in birds, the researchers said.
It is difficult for scientists to compare the embryos of today’s animals, such as crocodiles. Because, they must find a farm that raises these animals.
One of the molecular jobs is to determine exactly which developmental pathways are different, how they differ and what controls them. Molecular work can take “hours and hundreds of experiments for some to work,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, the study’s lead author who is a paleontologist and developmental biologist at the University of Chicago and the University of Yale. “It’s like finding fossils,” he said.
For their “fossil discovery,” the researchers needed an extensive fossil record of birds and their ancestors to see what birds looked like at different stages of their evolution.
“You have to understand what you’re tracking before trying to track it down,” Bhullar said.
Bhular with Arkhat Abzhanov, a developmental biologist at Harvard University, and their teammates focused on two genes that are active in facial development. Each gene encodes a protein, but the protein that performs the work of the gene shows different activity in the development of modern chicken and reptile embryos. When the researchers blocked the activity of these two proteins in chickens, the birds developed a structure that resembled a snout, not a beak.
And then there’s an unexpected finding that reveals the complex task at hand: When the research team turned a chicken embryo’s beak into a snout, they also inadvertently changed the roof of the chicken’s mouth.
Also Read: New species of lizard discovered after previously thought to be a bird
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY M. ENG/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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The 500-pound (225-kilogram) dinosaur probably ate a variety of plants, small animals, and eggs.
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So, by changing a chicken’s beak, the researchers also changed its palate. When the researchers returned to the fossil record, they found that the snout and palatine bones of birds appeared to have changed together throughout evolution. For example, an 85-million-year-old fossil of a bird-like creature that had primitive teeth and a beak also had a bird-like palate, they said.
Now the Horner team is currently working on creating a long-tailed chicken. Arguably, this is the most complicated part of making a dino-chicken, he said. For example, they needed to screen for genes in mice to determine what kind of genetic pathway was blocking tail development. This knowledge could help them figure out how to activate tail growth, he said.
Theoretically, trying to change the body structure of this chicken seems possible. However, Bhullar said, in the future the research team still has to see how a chicken will react to the presence of a tail, arms, fingers and teeth on its body.
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