How to Build a Dinosaur
The New Science of Reverse Evolution
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A world-renowned paleontologist reveals groundbreaking science that trumps science fiction: how to grow a living dinosaur.
Over a decade after Jurassic Park, Jack Horner and his colleagues in molecular biology labs are in the process of building the technology to create a real dinosaur.
Based on new research in evolutionary developmental biology on how a few select cells grow to create arms, legs, eyes, and brains that function together, Jack Horner takes the science a step further in a plan to "reverse evolution" and reveals the awesome, even frightening, power being acquired to recreate the prehistoric past. The key is the dinosaur's genetic code that lives on in modern birds- even chickens. From cutting-edge biology labs to field digs underneath the Montana sun, How to Build a Dinosaur explains and enlightens an awesome new science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The premise of this provocative but frustrating book by MacArthur Award winning paleontologist Horner and New York Times deputy science editor Gorman (coauthors of Digging Dinosaurs) : a kind of reverse genetic engineering could make it possible to " build" a dinosaur embryo from the embryo of a modern bird a chicken, say since birds are the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs. The trick would involve the new science of evolutionary development (known as evo devo) and a host of biological techniques. Horner and Gorman argue that during the process, one could stop and analyze every frame of the evolutionary tape as it played in reverse. The authors use the research on tail development of Hans Larsson at McGill University to explore how embryos can illuminate evolution. Much of the rest of the book offers background, but often digresses, for example, into hunting for DNA from 68-million-year-old dinosaur bones or the surfing habit of the man who discovered the polymerase chain reaction or how genetically close humans and Neanderthals are none of which advances the book's central argument. B&w illus.
