In the classical understanding, as in "Jurassic Park," humanity is unlikely to ever resurrect dinosaurs. The main and, seemingly, insurmountable problem is the complete degradation of DNA. The DNA molecule has a half-life of about 521 years, and even in ideal storage conditions, it becomes completely unreadable about 1.5 million years later. Dinosaurs, however, went extinct 66 million years ago, so all their genetic material has long since turned into a useless mixture of chemical compounds. The soft tissue remnants or collagen fragments discovered by scientists today are nothing more than fossilized shadows of past life, lacking genetic code. But even if we imagine the impossible and assume that the complete genome of a dinosaur could be synthesized artificially, we would encounter problems of a different order. The development of an embryo requires not only genes but also complex epigenetic regulation — instructions on when and how these genes should be activated during the growth process, and this information has been lost along with the DNA. Moreover, there is no suitable surrogate mother and egg: the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds, have eggs with a completely different internal structure. The immune system of the newly born creature would be completely defenseless against modern bacteria and viruses that have evolved for tens of millions of years. However, there is a more realistic and already being developed path that leads not to resurrection but to the creation of a kind of chimera. The famous paleontologist Jack Horner and a group of other scientists are promoting the idea of a "chicken-dinosaur," or Chickensaurus. They are not trying to find ancient DNA but are going in the opposite direction: ancient genes that are responsible for the traits of ancestors are sleeping in the genome of modern birds, direct descendants of dinosaurs. With the help of genetic editing, these atavistic programs can be awakened. In laboratory experiments on chicke ... Read more