Friday, December 9, 2011

Fixing the Chicken

Since I've been on vacation, I've been watching dinosaur specials. I know, it's really nerdy, but to compound it I've been doing this while making my Greek Principal Parts list.

So by now, I've run out of most of the various dinosaur specials that are around (sad!), and because all of my paleontology lectures from the "Prehistoric Creatures" series by National Geographic lectures on iTunes have stopped (do you hear that, National Geographic? Get your act together!), I've been seeking paleontology lectures elsewhere. I came across this TED Talk that totally cracked me up.
As it is, so far as we know, impossible to extract DNA from a dinosaur, Jack Horner talks about reconstructing a dinosaur from their closest living relatives, the birds (which are in fact classified as avian dinosaurs). He talks about reactivating genes in a chicken to create a living (non-avian) dinosaur. Pretty cool, and he's also quite funny.

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