Astronaut Farmer

[ Mood: Sleepy ]
I was watching Discovery Channel/Science Channel/NGC/some other science channel last night, and they were discussing creating dinosaurs from chickens.

What a fascinating concept. Reverse engineering chickens (actually,they think that emus would work better)so that they will regrow tales, feathers revert to scales, wings separate out into fingers, and teeth growing in their beaks. Just by turning on and off certain gene sequences, and adding certain hormones at the proper times. Thru experimentation, they were able to make chicken fetus’ tails up to 15 vertebre long, from the norm of 5, and teeth!!

Aside from the whole problem of having microraptors or velociraptors running around loose, I’m in favor of doing this. I just think that would be awesome. Can we make the scales different colors? How big can we make them grow? And who knows, maybe raptor steaks will be the new pork!! (We’ll still need cows to feed the raptors, so I’m not worried.)

If we find enough DNA, I think we should clone wooly mammoths, and sabertooth cats, and anything else prehistoric we can find. It’s tough to get me out of a zoo now, but if there were a giant sloth on display, I’d go every week!

Now we have fairly long strands of Neandertal DNA. If we cloned that, would that be comparable to cloning homo sapien? I don’t know, but I think, with a fairly reasonable chance of success, we should try. Call me a any kind of bad name you want, but we should see what kind of creature Neathertal really was.

Now, I’m not saying we should populate Yellowstone Part with mammoths or anything like that. But I would dearly love to see one.