Page 52 - Everything You Know About Dinosaurs is Wrong

Dinosaurs could be brought back to life
Pretty much everyone would like a pet PROTOCERATOPS wouldn’t they? Or a ride to school on a CAMARASAURUS? But would it ever be possible to bring extinct non-bird dinosaurs back from the dead?
One way some scientists think they can ‘de-extinct’ animals from the past is to put some of their DNA into the eggs of closely related animals alive today.
DNA is a chemical found in all living things that contains the instructions for how to build a particular animal, plant or other organism. By putting those instructions into the egg of another similar animal, maybe it would be possible to ride a KAMUYSAURUS to maths class . . .
Unfortunately, DNA only lasts for about one million years at the very most, and only in tiny amounts, so dinosaur DNA from at least 66 million years ago is highly unlikely ever to be found.
So we probably can’t use dinosaur DNA, but is there another way we could try to ‘make’ a dinosaur?
Scientists have already discovered that by turning on and off certain bits of DNA at different times, chickens can grow a toothy snout rather than a horny beak!
A few scientists think that by cleverly changing how birds grow from chicks, when they are very young, it would be possible to make them grow in the
same way their dinosaur ancestors did.
But would changing its face be a nice thing to do to a chicken? Maybe it would find eating difficult with a stubby face, and what if it made breathing hard? Questions like this – about ‘ethics’ and animal welfare – are really important to think about in science before any experiments are done.
What a dino-engineered chicken could look like.
DNA is a long, spiral string called
a double helix.
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