Jack Horner, a leading palaeontologist, is the project leader of a team who are attempting to recreate a dinosaur. Birds evolved from dinosaurs so by using a chicken embryo as a starting point for this reverse evolution it is like creating a dinosaur from a dinosaur.

Chickens have been studied in detail and their genome has been mapped so they are the ideal candidates for the project. Evolution suppresses many characteristics and it is the aim of the project to release a few of the dinosaur traits such as a bony tail, teeth, and forearms. The researchers are hoping to “awaken the dinosaur within” the chicken.

So are we likely to see flocks of dinochickens or chickenosaurus populating the world? Jack Horner says no, because it is only the development of the chicken that is being affected and not its genome. So if the dinochicken mated with an ordinary chicken it would just produce an ordinary chicken.