In a year which has been wholly unpredictable and apocalypse jokes have become commonplace in conversation and social media, why not bring back the dinosaurs? We already confirmed that UFOs exist and aliens might be flying around our planet but this year has been so wildly abnormal that no one really cared to keep that conversation going. Instead, we were obsessed with a Tiger King around that time. However, it might be time for the next big evolution in Earth’s history, even if we already have several movies about how it’s going to go down. According to scientists, we are officially in a window of time where technology can bring the dinosaurs back. Sometime between now and 2025.
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During a panel published five years as of June 9, 2020, the scientist who Jurassic Park’s Dr. Alan Grant is inspired by revealed an expectation technology to be capable of bringing dinosaurs back into existence sometime between today and five years from right now. His name is Dr. Jack Horner and in 2015 he was ready to deliver the “chickenosaurus,” because the DNA he had been studying was rooted in chickens, an ancestor to the dinosaur. As it turns out, his original belief, which is conveyed in the Jurassic Park movies which he consulted for, was that studying the DNA of dinosaur remains would be the key to recreating them. New studies, as of 2015, had ruled that out.
“I have tried many times to extract DNA from a dinosaur and we’ve always failed,” he said. “We think it’s because the DNA molecule is huge and it’s not very stable. It just comes apart too easily.”
During the panel 5 years ago, he was more focused on splicing and mashing different bits of DNA to recreate something like a dinosaur for today’s world. “Actually, the wings and hands are not as difficult,” Horner said, adding that a “Chickensoraus” — as he calls the creation — is well on its way to becoming reality. “The tail is the biggest project,” he said. “But on the other hand, we have been able to do some things recently that have given us hope that it won’t take too long.”
“Birds are living dinsaurs,” he explained. In fact, Horner had tried to put feathers on velociraptors for the Jurassic movies but director Steven Spielberg went for entertainment value of accuracy. “Steven and I had a lot of arguments about whether the velociraptors should have colors and be colorful,” Horner explained. “He won all of those argument. He said a technicolor feather dinosaur is not going to scare anyone. So, they’re grey and featherless.”
As the development of bringing dinos back was going, Horner explained that developing the DNA needed to produce these creatures relied on the success of the “dino chicken.” Once the dino-chicken was cracked, essentially meaning a chicken with dinosaur teeth and an alligator tail, the second version of it, he expects, will look a lot more like a velociraptor.
There doesn’t seem to have been too much on the development front when it comes to bringing dinosaurs back to life in the time which has passed since Horner was being interviewed surrounding the release of Jurassic World. Another Jurassic World movie came out and a third is on the way in the form of Dominion. Still, though, no dinosaurs for us in the real world.
Any day now.
