This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilise.

dna storage head

This just in from the what-could-mayhap-get-wrong section: Scientists from the Universidad de Republic of chile, headed by Joâo Botelho, genetically manipulated chickens then that they would grow up with legs like dinosaurs. They apparently did not notice the major premise of the latest Jurassic Park motion picture, because this really looks like someone in a lab coat thought "Let'due south make a creature grow up to express more velociraptor-like traits and simply see what happens."

But that'southward non fifty-fifty the crazy function. The crazy part is that to do this, the researchers didn't insert genes from any organism.  They just silenced a gene the chickens already had.

At present, they didn't build a chicken that looks like someone just cut-and-pasted a leathery light-green raptor leg onto it — only it'southward close enough for government work. You see, chickens have a discrete and macerated fibula. It's the tiny pin-like (not a coincidence: fibula is Latin for pin) bone we hate in craven legs. Suppressing ane of the genes responsible for the differences between raptors and chickens — in this case, information technology'southward a cistron called Indian Hedgehog which is important to bone development — resulted in chickens that develop a full-length, tubular fibula continued at the ankle.  They ended up with chickens possessed of os structure that matches the lower leg anatomy of a raptor. The dino-chicken leg bones await simply like raptor leg bones, as visible here:

Deinonychus, the dinosaur pictured hither, is a raptor that lived in Due north America. Image courtesy of Universidad de Republic of chile.

Dinosaurs, which are the ancestors of chickens, had a tibia and fibula of the same length, continued at the ankle. In the evolution from dinosaurs to birds, the fibula retracted under lighter utilize and no longer connects to the talocrural joint; it became shorter than the other bone in the lower leg, the tibia. Embryologists had already discovered that during the course of development, bird embryos first develop a tubular, full-length, dinosaur-like fibula. Only later does it become shorter than the tibia and acquire its mature, pivot-like shape.

This is the 2d time Botelho has tempted fate achieved an experimental reversion to a dinosaur-like trait in birds. Previously, he had managed to undo the evolution of the backward-facing perching toe of birds, using cistron modification to produce birds with a non-twisted, non-opposed toe, also just like dinosaurs had — and another lab at Yale built a craven with a dinosaur-like snout past altering cistron expression in chicken embryos. But the scientists assure united states that they aren't trying to produce dinosaurs. You lot know, but parts of dinosaurs. Or things like dinosaurs. Non sure which is less terrifying.

"The experiments are focused on single traits, to examination specific hypotheses," says Alexander Vargas, in whose lab Botelho fabricated the chickens. "Non only do we know a great deal nigh bird development, just also about the dinosaur-bird transition, which is well-documented by the fossil record. This leads naturally to hypotheses on the evolution of development, that can exist explored in the lab."

Do not meddle in the diplomacy of dinosaurs, for you are squishy and good with ketchup.

Sooner or later we'll hear how this series of experiments plays out. Meanwhile, I'll be busy being glad I don't live on or near an isle.