Even so, drugs have shown some promise in saving the embryo’s tiny forearms. Larsson has also managed to produce one specimen with a couple of extra vertebrae. And a few years ago, scientists from the Universities of Wisconsin and Manchester discovered a mutant chicken with a complete set of teeth, an ability that was lost in birds about 100 million years ago, suggesting they can be developed, too (the mutant died before it could hatch). The work is still mostly trial and error, but “we’re getting closer,” he says.
If his efforts succeed, what will Hans Larsson have created? “Within five years, I think we could get a chicken with a tail, forearms, and teeth, and transform its feathers back to their ancestral shape, which is probably a hollow quill,” he says. It would be slightly larger than a standard chicken, although using another bird species (say, an emu) or treating it with growth hormones could produce different results. It would still have a chicken genome, and so wouldn’t technically be a T. rex or a velociraptor; but it wouldn’t be a chicken, either, at least not as we’d recognize it. So what, exactly, would it be?
“It would be a dinosaur,” Larsson says, “because chickens are dinosaurs.”
Fly a helicopter across the Siberian permafrost, and look down at the open spaces below. “You can just close your eyes, and see herds of woolly mammoths walking across it,” Hendrik Poinar says. As a child, he dreamt of seeing the mammoth, a woolly rhinoceros or even a sabre-tooth tiger in the flesh, instead of just in his history books. “You can’t help but be fascinated at the possibility of laying your eyes on something as iconic as that.” It’s easy to get swept up in the excitement, but Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto, urges a note of caution. “Jurassic Park was a really fun movie,” he says, “until the dinosaurs got loose.”
Of course, Bowman’s speaking in metaphor: not much threat would be posed by a turkey-sized chickenosaurus, even if one flew the coop. In his book, Horner notes that if his dinosaur escaped, it would have about the same chance of survival as a lone chicken. “If by some miracle it did mate with a hen or rooster,” he writes, “the result would be an old-fashioned chicken. If it died, we could stuff it and roast it. It would taste, as the proverb says, like chicken.”
Sounds harmless enough. Beyond the chance such a creature could escape, though, Bowman says we need to “take a deep breath” before tinkering with animal life. With the mammoth, “knowing elephants, I can only imagine these are highly sophisticated, social and sentient creatures,” he says, adding that, if one were created, it would likely be in isolation. Bringing back a Neanderthal, of course, would be even more fraught. “What would its moral status be?” asks Bowman, who is also president of the Canadian Great Ape Alliance. As our own sibling species, “would it be housed in a zoo? Would it be treated as a low-functioning human?” Would it be closer to an ape, or to a person?
Even Poinar, who collaborated on the woolly mammoth genome project, questions the merits of actually creating one. “Typically there’s a drive in science to do something, just to say you’ve done it,” he says. “There is no scientific benefit to bringing back an extinct species like [the mammoth], that I can think of. You’re creating a biological curiosity that’s going to sit in a zoo, or even a theme park. To me, that is sad enough.”
But for Jack Horner, making people stare is exactly the point. The chickenosaurus will be a conversation piece, he says, sparking a public debate about evolution by winding its tape backwards for all to see. “Let’s put it this way,” Horner says. “You can’t make a dinosaur out of a chicken, if evolution doesn’t work.”
