2013-03-29
[public] 35.7K views, 538 likes, dislikes audio only
View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/building-a-dinosaur-from-a-chicken-jack-horner
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a "Chickenosaurus".
Talk by Jack Horner.