Archi

The idea of cloning dinosaurs is a pretty old one. There are even kids nowadays who have only seen the third Jurassic Park movie. Unfortunately, the cloning of dinosaur from ancient DNA is complete science fiction. The half life of DNA is only a few thousand years and would degrade into complete junk before even a million years was up. Hense, there is no usable dinosaur DNA in the world. But wait, aren't birds the descendants of dinosaur, and aren't crocodilians similar to their ancestors? The Edmonton Journal reported today that a lab will be trying to genetically engineer a basal bird by essentially turning back the evolutionary timeline and reactivate the dormant dinosaur genes. The article made it sound like this lab will be mass producing Tyrranosaurus rex's for all to see, but the truth lies elsewhere. There is no way to recreate a dinosaur that existed millions of years ago. Even the most skilled genetic engineers wouldn't know what code they were working towards, and so could not create an exact duplicate. It would be possible to eventually make something that is indescernable from a dinosaur or basal bird, but it isn't the same as cloning.
I happen to know that this isn't a new idea at all. Developemental biologists have long been able to induce the produciton of distinctly ancestral characters in bird. There was an experiment in the 80's described in Stephen J. Gould's "Hen's teeth and Horse's toes," which illustrates that the tissue from the jaw of a chicken can be forced to grow teeth if the dernal layer from the jaw of a mouse was spliced ontop of it, and it's inserted into a growth medium (in this case the growth medium was the eyes of another mouse). The dentin producing genes in the mouse were still active and that was all that was needed to kick start the produciton of teeth in the bird jaw. It was shown that one could make the tibia and fibula the same length (a feature of dinosaurs and archaeopteryx) by inserting a mica plate in between them and not allowing the fibula from taking all of the nutrients from the tibia. Lots of experiments have been done with mice which increases the number of vertebrae in the tail, which could potentially be used to creat the long bony tail of archaeopteryx. As for the fused wing instead of the hand; there is a type of bird of currently unknown relation, called the Hoatzin or Guyanna fowl. This national bird of Guyanna hatches from its egg with unfused fingers and claws on the ends of its digits. Young hoatzin's use these claws to climb branches and escape predators until they start to develope primary flight feathers, at which time the fingers begin to fuse. if one were to keep the fingers from fusing, then you would have a clawed bird that's a weaker flier.