We’ve all seen the movie Jurassic Park (I assume). The method to the madness of bringing living, breathing dinosaurs back to life in that movie, was to find prehistoric pieces of amber with bugs perfectly preserved inside and extract their blood — assuming that they’ve fed on dinosaurs and contain their DNA. Though it’s likely that scientists have attempted to try this, it’s not something that many expect to actually work. Now comes word that a scientist in Canada has a whole new plan to possibly bring dinosaurs back to life.
Canada Research Chair in Macro Evolution at Montreal’s McGill University, Hans Larsson, believes the fact that dinosaurs are ancestors of birds may just hold the key. He believes that while a chicken is its embryonic stages, he can literally go in and alter this, change that, and replicate what once was, hundreds of millions of years ago.
Larsson has been studying the evolution of birds for a decade now, and truly believes that in time, he could find a way to do the unthinkable: hatch a live prehistoric creature.
The scientist — who was partly inspired by Jurassic Park — says that his research is in its earliest of stages and that we’re still a long way off from actually attempting the process, but for now, he believes it may be too big of a step to take.
Here’s what Larsson had to say:
It’s a demonstration of evolution.
If I can demonstrate clearly that the potential for dinosaur anatomical development exists in birds, then it again proves that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.
So the question presents itself once again: if we had the completely legit opportunity to hatch a brand new living dinosaur, would you want to see it happen? Or is playing God in this regard just too far to go, especially with the fear everyone has that we’d lose control and they’d run wild and take over again?
[Source: PhysOrg via io9]
