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MARTHA ALLEN: How to build a dinosaur

POSTED: July 2, 2009

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I’m so excited! On Monday, July 6, at 7:30 p.m., Jim Gorman will be speaking at the Keene Valley Library. Gorman is deputy science editor at the “New York Times,” and his lecture is titled “How to Build a Dinosaur.” The book he coauthored with paleontologist Jack Horner, “How To Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have To Be Forever,” was published by Dutton this year.

    Horner worked with the makers of “Jurassic Park,” one of my all-time favorite movie series. As you may recall, the plot of these movies revolved around the re-creation of dinosaurs by scientists who had manipulated DNA taken from blood removed from the tiny guts of mosquitoes who had bitten dinos, only to be encased in resin that over time hardened into amber.

    The so-called building of a dinosaur proposed in Horner and Gorman’s book would be done differently, however. Horner has long claimed that birds are not only descended from dinosaurs, but are in fact dinosaurs themselves, and so possess the same genes as their nonavian dinosaur ancestors. (I love the term, used frequently in the book, “nonavian dinosaur.”) It’s simply a matter of triggering the switches that control whether teeth, a lengthy vertebrate tail and those funny little arms instead of wings will manifest themselves as the embryo develops.

    Of course, there are going to be people who ask, not whether recreating a nonavian dinosaur can be done—as we know, scientists can do just about anything they can get funding for—but whether it should be done. And the answer, of course, is yes.

    To those who would argue that messing about with chicken embryos is cruel, I say go tackle International House of Pancakes—they do terrible things to eggs, from a chicken’s point of view— or the growing contingent of natural food advocates who say that eating fertilized eggs is better for your health than eating the eggs of virgin biddies.

    Why should scientists tinker with chickens in order to produce a throwback to their nonavian dino ancestors?

    Well, just because it would be so cool.

    In the book Horner mentions his dream of leading a chickenosaur with teeth, vertebrate tail and arms into class on a leash and asking his students to identify it. I’m pretty sure this is his true goal. Why wouldn’t it be? He loves dinosaurs.

    What if the chickenosaurs get loose and breed?

    Well, Horner and Gorman are talking about chicken dinos. It’s not as if Horner is proposing to bring back scary species like T. rex and Velociraptor. Although that would be really cool too, so maybe he would try it, eventually. You have to keep an eye on scientists.

    The other day my daughter and I were in a mall in Plattsburgh, and she spied me from a distance as I wandered around.

    “Where were you doddering off to?” she asked me afterward.

    Little children toddle. The elderly dodder. Right? I looked it up when we got home.

    Yes, it’s a word dating from the 17th century, somewhat before my time, meaning to walk unsteadily with shaky limbs, and it is age related.

    T. rex and chickens, I realized years ago in an intuitive flash, shared a distinctive style of walking.

    When Molly was very small, and couldn’t talk as well, and by all signs held her mother in the highest regard, we lived in Colorado, and she had a chicken as a pet. One day we were watching the chicken strut around the yard, with that neck-jerking motion that chickens use, and it occurred to me that T. rex probably moved in just that way. Soon afterward I heard about Jack Horner’s theory that birds are in fact dinosaurs, and I have been fascinated by his work ever since.

    I know that Gorman will present a spellbinding lecture.

    If they do someday recreate T. rex, I dare Dr. Horner to walk up to the full-grown living nonavian dinosaur to test if it bites. He has received a lot of press in recent years for his statements that the tyrannosaur was a scavenger rather than a hunter. Look at its teeth!

    I’m just saying.

    It is storming again. All we have for weather lately are thunder and lightning and sheets of rain, in this drench-green, tropical-looking environment of Keene Valley. It’s just like in “Jurassic Park,” after the power went out and the nonavian dinosaurs had permeated the manmade barriers. Remember the way the water trembled in the drinking glass, just before T. rex arrived, shaking the jungle as he doddered onto the scene? I’d better go.

    Have a good week! Maybe I’ll see you at the lecture.

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