There's No Question Any More: Dinosaurs Had Feathers!

It's long been a topic of debate: were dinosaurs warm- or cold-blooded? Were they crocodile-like lizards or were they chicken-like birds? Did they have leathery skin or bright feathers?

Now there is irrefutable proof: dinosaurs were like birds and they had feathers. Scientists have found the tail of baby dinosaur preserved in amber, and it was covered in tiny feathers:

The dinosaur was a coelurosaur, a theropod related to Tyrannosarus Rex and the velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame. It was trapped in amber 99 million years ago.

By coincidence, last night I happened to watch the 1997 sequel of Jurassic Park, in which a human-engineered T. Rex somehow escapes from one island, populates another island and grows to full size in just a couple of years, and then rampages through the streets of San Diego when idiotic humans bent on corporate profits threaten its baby and underestimate its potential for death and destruction.

But the 1997 Jurassic Park T. Rex still had reptilian skin instead of iridescent feathers.

For decades scientists had come to believe more and more that dinosaurs were the precursors of birds, and that reptiles like crocodiles were a separate classification. There were clues in the structure of the hands and wrists, the hips and ankles. There was fossil evidence of feathers in several types of dinosaurs in the past, but rock fossils aren't as detailed or dramatic as amber. Amber almost literally freezes soft tissue in time.

DNA in dinosaur blood in the gut of a mosquito trapped in amber was the conceit for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park dinosaurs. Sadly, DNA has a half-life of only 521 years, so that means it completely degrades in less than seven million years. It's impossible to recover dinosaur DNA.

Or is it? Birds descended from dinosaurs, so that means their DNA started on the same branch of the evolutionary tree as T. Rex. Might it be possible to "rewind" millions of years of evolution in bird DNA to that branching point, and then engineer that DNA, "fast forwarding" it with mutations that imbue T. Rex characteristics?

Scientists have already done experiments on chicken embryos that cause dinosaur-like snouts to develop. And tooth-like protrusions have been found in chicken embryos with a mutant version of the talpid² gene, which turned on the sonic hedgehog gene (yep, it's really called that), which is involved in tooth production in vertebrates.

If you put that engineered DNA in an ostrich egg and hatched it, you wouldn't have the T. Rex. But you would have a kind of T. Rex that might have existed in some alternate version of reality.

In the Jurassic Park movies the T. Rex was portrayed an unstoppable force of nature that men could not hope to control. So would recreating one be a foolhardy and dangerous experiment?

A T. Rex is about the size of an African elephant: the gigantic T. Rex "Sue" has been estimated to be about nine tons, while the largest elephant discovered weighed in at 11 tons. T. Rex had a bigger brain relative to its body size than most dinosaurs, much of it dedicated to the senses of vision and smell.

But elephants have much bigger brains than T. Rex, and humans are generally able to control elephants. So, yeah, a newly engineered T. Rex might get loose and kill someone. But elephants -- and lions, tigers, wolves and humans -- have been doing that for millennia.

If we want to worry about people getting killed inadvertently by inappropriate use of biotechnology, the potential for death and destruction is much greater from super bacteria created through overuse of antibiotics in hog production than it is from re-engineering dinosaurs.