The world's most famous dino-hunter says the key is embryonic development, not genetics.
by Jack Horner and James Gorman
From the April 2009 issue, publi
Hans Larsson is a fast walker and a fast talker. You need to be fit to keep up with him on the hills of the McGill University neighborhood in Montreal, let alone on the remote islands of the Canadian Arctic where he searches for fossils in summer fieldwork. He talks the way he walks, in a freely swinging fast-paced lope that ranges from the philosophy of science to genetic probes to the rich Cretaceous ecosystem he is exploring at another field site in Alberta.
Larsson is at the forefront of merging paleontology and molecular biology in an effort to connect major evolutionary changes—the development of new species and new characteristics, new shapes and structures, new kinds of animals—to changes in specific genes and in how those genes are regulated. He is interested in reactivating dormant genes or changing the regulation of active genes in embryos to bring back ancestral traits that have been lost in evolution.
Scientists can do this now because we have the fossils. We have the lessons of developmental biology. And we have the tools of molecular biology. All of these are being merged in the study of the history of life in evolutionary developmental biology, or evo devo.
Read full story at: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/apr/27-jack-horner.s-plan-bring-dinosaurs-back-to-life
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