The Next Big Comeback - Dinosaurs?

Americans tend to look at Canada like the cousin you see at family reunions - nice, polite (maybe a little too polite), friendly, but just a little dull. Maybe we should rethink that assessment because, according to MacLean's Magazine, the scientists at Montreal's McGill University are involved in some pretty freaky stuff, namely trying to turn a chicken into a dinosaur.

Yeah, you read that right. The project is the convergence of some new studies in biology, genetics and evolutionary theory, with a little Jurassic Park thrown in for good measure. But unlike Jurassic Park, the scientists at McGill aren't trying to make a dinosaur by putting together fragments of fossilized DNA, instead they are trying to make one by turning off some of your average chicken's genes.

Apparently, for a brief stage in its development, an embryonic chicken looks like a little dinosaur - complete with fingers, claws, teeth and a tail. Then, in the space of a few hours, all these traits transform into wings, feathers and a beak. Scientists think that the embryo goes through its own mini-evolution, where the ancient dinosaur traits are replaced by the modern chicken ones. But, they theorize, if you can turn off this evolution-in-an-egg at just the right time, what will hatch will be a dinosaur - albeit a chicken-sized one.

The scientists are pretty convinced they will be able to do this in the near future, along with re-creating a host of extinct animals like the wooly mammoth and the Tasmanian Tiger. Of course whether they should do this is another question open to a lot of debate, it seems to me like the whole message of Jurassic Park was that experiments like this can go horribly awry (even if the thought of a zoo full of dinosaurs and mammoths is pretty cool).