Having been following a lot of articles and new information surrounding some of my favorite interests I thought, maybe, some people here would be interested too. You see, these interests are: science, history and dinosaurs.
Like any science, things are constantly being found and evolving over time. What may be considered the current understanding could be suddenly changed by a new discovery. What I will be posting is the CURRENT understanding, which I find to be pretty awesome and cool.
I don't know how many of you keep up with the new dinosaur news. It probably depends on whether you have a young kid who loves dinosaurs or whether you just keep following along like I do. But, dinosaurs directly relate to our beloved backyard flocks.
Let me start with the family tree, going back a long, long time ago. Crocodile and like reptiles, dinosaurs, and our modern birds all evolved from one common ancestor (the Archosaur, which wasn't a dinosaur... dinosaurs weren't around yet!) You may think that our modern birds are closer relatives to the pterosaurs, but pterosaurs are actually their own distinct evolutionary branch. Current science has determined that modern birds, including our chickens and turkeys and ducks, are most closely related to the therapod branch of dinosaurs - spinosaurs, tyrannosaurs and raptors, for example.
Note: It is not believed that T-Rex and other dinosaurs shrunk down a couple tons to become birds. Generally speaking, the therapods that supposedly evolved into birds were smaller ones to begin with. Since most large dinosaurs went extinct during the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs as we know it, it was the smaller ones that survived.
Google break: look up Cassowary and the Secretary Bird. Two very cool looking existing birds that have some interesting physical characteristics. You don't need to look them up. They just look awesome.
Since DNA from the times of dinosaurs cannot be found (it's fragile stuff, and wouldn't survive millions of years of... things happening), they have to compare bone structure, anatomy, and fibers found on fossils. And, after testing collagen fibers, it turns out chickens and ostriches had the most closely related fiber to the beloved T. Rex (the runner up was the alligator).
While scientists cannot find and extract DNA from dinosaur fossils, they have started to look at other means to find the relationship between birds and therapods... namely, in the DNA in chickens.
The existing genetic material within a chicken would allow for minor DNA tweaking to cause embryos to form with these differences: a jaw instead of a beak (a beak is just an adaptation that's slightly overgrown of two bones already existing in jaws), and teeth. Imagine a chicken with teeth and jaws? With a little experimenting, they managed to produce an embryo that had an actual snout. They didn't hatch these eggs, in case you were wondering. It would even be possible to change their wings to forearms with hands.
I guess the question we should ask is "should we?"
I think we have 5 movies telling us it might not be a good idea to reverse-engineer a dinosaur, on top of loads of evidence in nature of what happens when you introduce a species that doesn't belong in an environment to a new environment. And of course, varying degrees of ethics and the embryos in question.
But, on paper, it's a pretty interesting thing to think about.
In future posts I want to talk about the more modern view on certain dinosaurs that look a lot like modern day birds (just bigger, with teeth and claws). I just want to see if I have an interested audience here. And don't worry, I'll post links to all this cool information for anyone who wants to read into it.
So next time your chicken goes and kills a mouse and eats it, remember... its ancestors used to have a mouth for that!
Links will mostly be to news articles 'about' the articles, since most of the articles need a subscription of some kind to a journal for you guys to read them.
ALSO: Please don't start any debating in the comments about evolution vs creationism. If all you decide to take away from this is that Cassowaries and Secretary Birds look really cool then that's just fine.
T-Rex collagen matches to chickens and ostriches: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/t-rex-linked-to-chickens-ostriches-180940877/
Recreating dinosaurs from chickens: http://www.thespaceacademy.org/2018/06/scientists-say-they-can-recreate-living.html
Dinosaur family tree: https://www.nature.com/news/dinosaur-family-tree-poised-for-colossal-shake-up-1.21681
Pterosaurs: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/pterosauria.html
Like any science, things are constantly being found and evolving over time. What may be considered the current understanding could be suddenly changed by a new discovery. What I will be posting is the CURRENT understanding, which I find to be pretty awesome and cool.
I don't know how many of you keep up with the new dinosaur news. It probably depends on whether you have a young kid who loves dinosaurs or whether you just keep following along like I do. But, dinosaurs directly relate to our beloved backyard flocks.
Let me start with the family tree, going back a long, long time ago. Crocodile and like reptiles, dinosaurs, and our modern birds all evolved from one common ancestor (the Archosaur, which wasn't a dinosaur... dinosaurs weren't around yet!) You may think that our modern birds are closer relatives to the pterosaurs, but pterosaurs are actually their own distinct evolutionary branch. Current science has determined that modern birds, including our chickens and turkeys and ducks, are most closely related to the therapod branch of dinosaurs - spinosaurs, tyrannosaurs and raptors, for example.
Note: It is not believed that T-Rex and other dinosaurs shrunk down a couple tons to become birds. Generally speaking, the therapods that supposedly evolved into birds were smaller ones to begin with. Since most large dinosaurs went extinct during the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs as we know it, it was the smaller ones that survived.
Google break: look up Cassowary and the Secretary Bird. Two very cool looking existing birds that have some interesting physical characteristics. You don't need to look them up. They just look awesome.
Since DNA from the times of dinosaurs cannot be found (it's fragile stuff, and wouldn't survive millions of years of... things happening), they have to compare bone structure, anatomy, and fibers found on fossils. And, after testing collagen fibers, it turns out chickens and ostriches had the most closely related fiber to the beloved T. Rex (the runner up was the alligator).
While scientists cannot find and extract DNA from dinosaur fossils, they have started to look at other means to find the relationship between birds and therapods... namely, in the DNA in chickens.
The existing genetic material within a chicken would allow for minor DNA tweaking to cause embryos to form with these differences: a jaw instead of a beak (a beak is just an adaptation that's slightly overgrown of two bones already existing in jaws), and teeth. Imagine a chicken with teeth and jaws? With a little experimenting, they managed to produce an embryo that had an actual snout. They didn't hatch these eggs, in case you were wondering. It would even be possible to change their wings to forearms with hands.
I guess the question we should ask is "should we?"
I think we have 5 movies telling us it might not be a good idea to reverse-engineer a dinosaur, on top of loads of evidence in nature of what happens when you introduce a species that doesn't belong in an environment to a new environment. And of course, varying degrees of ethics and the embryos in question.
But, on paper, it's a pretty interesting thing to think about.
In future posts I want to talk about the more modern view on certain dinosaurs that look a lot like modern day birds (just bigger, with teeth and claws). I just want to see if I have an interested audience here. And don't worry, I'll post links to all this cool information for anyone who wants to read into it.
So next time your chicken goes and kills a mouse and eats it, remember... its ancestors used to have a mouth for that!
Links will mostly be to news articles 'about' the articles, since most of the articles need a subscription of some kind to a journal for you guys to read them.
ALSO: Please don't start any debating in the comments about evolution vs creationism. If all you decide to take away from this is that Cassowaries and Secretary Birds look really cool then that's just fine.
T-Rex collagen matches to chickens and ostriches: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/t-rex-linked-to-chickens-ostriches-180940877/
Recreating dinosaurs from chickens: http://www.thespaceacademy.org/2018/06/scientists-say-they-can-recreate-living.html
Dinosaur family tree: https://www.nature.com/news/dinosaur-family-tree-poised-for-colossal-shake-up-1.21681
Pterosaurs: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/pterosauria.html
My favorite is the Mosasaurus. Which I know isn't technically a dinosaur, but I still like it.
