HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR EXTINCTION DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FOREVER JACK HORNER AND JAMES GORMAN % DUTTON HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR EXTINCTION DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FOREVER JACK HORNER AND JAMES GORMAN % DUTTON DUTTON Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Can - ada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Peng uin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2009 by John R. Horner and James Gorman All rights reserved % REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Horner, John R. How to build a dinosaur : extinction doesn’t have to be forever / Jack Horner and James Gorman. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Evolutionary paleobiology. 2. Dinosaurs—Extinction. I. Gorman, James, 1949– II. Title. QE721.2.E85H67 2009 567.9—dc22 2008048042 Photo credits: Page 30, courtesy of the author; Page 82, Mary Schweitzer; Page 195, © J. J. Audubon/VIREO; Pages 216 and 217, © Phil Wilson. Set in Dante MT Designed by Daniel Lagin Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copy- righted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any respon - sibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. ISB N: 1-101-02591-3 For Darwin CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1. HELL CREEK TIME, SPACE, AND DIGGING TO THE PAST 16 2. IT’S A GIRL! A PREGNANCY TEST FOR T. R E X 57 3. MOLECULES ARE FOSSILS TOO BIOLOGICAL SECRETS IN ANCIENT BONES 85 4. DINOSAURS AMONG US CHICKENS AND OTHER COUSINS OF T. R E X 114 5. WHERE BABIES COME FROM ANCESTORS IN THE EGG 133 CON T E N T S 6. WAG THE BIRD THE SHRINKING BACKBONE 165 7. REVERSE EVOLUTION EXPERIMENTING WITH EXTINCTION 192 APPENDIX: CHICKENOSAURUS SKELETON 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 219 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 229 INDEX 231 viii [...]... living animals He was—and this appealed to many a small boy—not a hunter who killed his prey, but a collector of live animals And his motto, once as well known as any of today’s catchphrases, was: Bring ’em back alive Well, paleontologists may deal with the long dead But at the heart of all the digging and preparation of skeletons and museum displays is the attempt to reconstruct the past, to recreate... was, 7 HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR however, a fiction that reflected the science of its time, the fascination with DNA and the idea that we would have a complete blueprint of a dinosaur to make one Now we are actually much closer to being able to create a dinosaur, without needing to recover ancient DNA We can do it because of the nature of evolution, and the way it builds on itself, adapting old plans to. .. changes in DNA that cause identifiable changes in body shape in the laboratory, among fruit flies in particular But we are just now beginning to link molecular changes to large changes in the history of life, like the loss of a tail A nonavian dinosaur has not yet hatched from a chicken egg This book is about how that became a goal I want to pursue, and how that pursuit is continuing, about how I and... evolutionary biology Evolutionary change is added to existing plans Genetic blueprints are not thrown out We don’t have to start from 9 HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR scratch to grow a dinosaur We don’t have to retrieve ancient DNA for cloning Birds are descended from dinosaurs Actually, they are dinosaurs, and most of the genetic program for the dinosaur characteristics we want to bring back should still be available... evolutionary biology, but they are more intriguing than you might imagine They appear and disappear in evolution They appear and disappear in the growth of a tadpole Most primates have tails Humans and great apes are exceptions The dinosaurs had tails, some quite remarkable Birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, now almost universally described by scientists as avian dinosaurs, do not have tails They have tail... types Chemical signals directed by DNA turned it away from the path of growth that would lead to a nonavian dinosaur, but it seemed highly likely that all the raw material, all the genetic information needed to grow a dinosaur, was in that embryo How much, I wondered, would it take to redirect its growth so that it ended up looking like a dinosaur? Experimentalists have already caused a chicken to grow... internal cavities of skulls We have theorized about the colors and sounds and behavior of dinosaurs And now, we can try to make a living dinosaur This is a project that will outrage some people as a sacrilegious attempt to interfere with life, and be scoffed at by others as impossible, and by others as more showmanship than science I don’t have answers to these challenges, really, because the answers are... fossils It has been a town of note to geologists, paleontologists, and their audience since the days of Barnum Brown at least But it has some more recent claims to fame, not all savory In 1996 Jordan was the site of a small rebellion against the United States on the part of a group called the Freemen, a white supremacist militia that specialized in bank fraud The 23 HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR group were followers... to be able to do it with teeth, feathers, wings, and feet The most studied and most available bird for both laboratory and culinary experiments is the chicken Why couldn’t we take a chicken embryo and biochemically nudge it this way and that, until what hatched was not a chicken but a small dinosaur, with teeth, forearms with claws, and a tail? No reason at all We haven’t done it yet But we are taking... molecular makeup of fossilized tissue We describe what dinosaurs were like and present these ideas in scientific papers and books We build skeletons and sculptures of dinosaurs that any museumgoer can appreciate We have made robotic dinosaurs for education and entertainment We have even helped make movies hew more closely to the scientific facts So it’s a natural enough step to go from building a dinosaur to . HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR EXTINCTION DOESN’T HAVE TO BE FOREVER JACK HORNER AND JAMES GORMAN % DUTTON HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR HOW TO BUILD A DINOSAUR EXTINCTION DOESN’T HAVE TO. with DNA and the idea that we would have a com- plete blueprint of a dinosaur to make one. Now we are actually much closer to being able to create a dinosaur, without need - ing to recover ancient. known as any of today’s catchphrases, was: Bring ’em back alive. Well, paleontologists may deal with the long dead. But at the heart of all the digging and preparation of skeletons and museum