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s c ience
aleontologist Jack Horner has just
released his sixth book. And that means
hes written more books than hes read,
he likes to tell people.
Its not entirely a joke.
Writing a book is never easy. Not if
its a good one. But writing is a partic-
ularly difficult job for Horner, because
he has dyslexia. Still, you cant really say he suffers from
the condition.
Rather, he says its helped make him who he is, which
is probably the best-known dinosaur scientist in the world,
and certainly one of the most accomplished.
Dyslexia is a genetic condition that makes it difficult
in some cases nearly impossible to read and write.
Horner says his case is extreme. Just reading t he icons on
his computer desktop requires concentration.
I read at a third-grade level, he said.And yet he has won a
MacArthur genius grant, he
helped reinvent how the world understands dinosaurs, he
mentors a variety of Ph.D. candidates, and he oversees the
Evolution of aPaleontologist
B Y S C O T T M C M IL L IO N
P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y T H O M A S L E E
P
Labeled everything from lazy and dumb
to genius, Jack Horner uses his unique mind
to push the envelope with his latest idea:
hatching a chickenosaur
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making a chicken grow the teeth, arms and tail of a
dinosaur.
Molecules are fossils, too, he says in his new book. They
illustrate the link between extinct di nosaurs and their
modern
relatives, the birds we see every day.
There must be a marriage or merger of the skills and
knowledge of molecular biology and paleontology, he wrote.
That blend t he shovel work in the sun-baked fields and
the sterilized laboratories of the microbiologist are what
makes it possible to grow a new dinosaur.
THE CHICKEN AND THE EGG
Modern birds still carry the genetics of their ancientancestors,
genes that would allow them to grow teeth in their
beaks, arms instead of wings, and long tails instead of the
stubs
they now have, Horner says.
Evidence of this can be seen in chicken embryos, where
birds take the microscopic first steps toward growing teeth
and
tails and arms. But along the way, a biochemical signal
arrives
and shuts off the genes, so those body parts stop
developing.
To keep them growing requires neutralizing the off-switch,
which can be done chemically while the embryo is stil l in
the
egg. Horner is now working closely with scientists at
Canadas
McGill University, trying to make it happen.
His goal, he said, is to show that evolution is real.
And trotting out a dinosaur on a leash would be a lot more
effective than a slide show.
If evolution didnt work, you couldnt do that, he said.
Thats because, if the chicken didnt already have dino-
saur genes, it couldnt grow dinosaur parts. No foreign genes
will be implanted in the chicken embryos.
If the creature somehow managed to breed, it would
create baby chickens, not dinosaurs, because its genes
remain
unchanged. They just experienced some different on-off
switches
in the embryonic stage.And if it escaped, it wouldnt tear up the
world like the crea-
tures in the Jurassic Park movies. It would have roughly the
same
chances of survival as any chicken on its own in the world.
I have no doubt that we can do what Ive proposed, to
bring back teeth, tail and forearms with claws, he wrote in
the
new book. It wont be easy and the money may not be forth-
coming, but it will happen.
But even if its possible, is creating such a beast a good
idea?
Horner maintains it is.
Growing a long tail on a chicken could add greatly to what
we know about spinal cord development, and that could help
treat human afflictions, he said. As the work continues,
other
breakthroughs in genetic medicine could occur.
Its about figuring out how to deal with genetic diseases,
he said.
And presenting such a creature Horner likes the idea
of bringing it to the Oprah Winfrey show would not be a
carnival sideshow.
Even more than a fossil, it would cry out for an explana-
tion, he wrote in the new book.
A chickenosaurus is possible only through reversingevolution, he
said. And if evolution can be reversed, that
means it happened.
Im an educator trying to show everyone that evolution is
real, he said.
He acknowledges that some people are going to have
problems with his proposal.
This is a project that will outrage some people as a
sacrilegious attempt to interfere with life, and be scoffed
at
by others as impossible, and by others as more showmanship
than science, he wrote.
But the story I have to tell i
about questions than answers, an
a conversation about the ethics, th
all, the possibilities.
Horner says he doesnt have a
But hes posing the questions.
Theyre big and theyre co
dismissed in his early years as slo
Somebody is going to grow a d
North America or maybe in Singap
and university committees dont a
technology exists. So does the knoItll get done, he said. Its
j
And thats why he wrote t he b
Its time to talk about this stu
When we get to the point of
be a decision that involves societ
scientists in a laboratory, Horner
his book. Most of all, this book is
ture. I can say how it begins, but
how it ends.
