Jurassic Chicken Project aims to rewind evolution

Teams of scientists are working on plans to recreate dinosaurs by winding backwards evolution and picking out genes in modern animals that would also have existed millions of years ago.

The scheme – called the "Jurassic Chicken Project" because researchers reckon most of the genes in chickens are interchangeable with those of dinosaurs – is so ambitious that it could take decades to come to fruition.

But Professor Rudolph Raff, a specialist in evolutionary biology at Indiana University, was optimistic. "Looking back on the Wright brothers' plane, it was clear that there would be jets some day," he said.

The project would have to rewind the 65 million of years of evolution since dinosaurs lived. But, as Professor Cliff Tabin, of the department of genetics at Harvard University told New Scientist magazine, DNA sequencing has discovered that organisms as diverse as worms, flies and humans share two genes for limb development that first appeared 700 million years ago.

"I've never seen a triceratops," said Professor Tabin, referring to a four-legged herbivorous dinosaur. "But those same molecules [generated from the two shared genes] built its limbs."

Some scientists are worried that a dinosaur created today could cause the same havoc as depicted in the Jurassic Park films – where the animals escape from their game park.

David Stern, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, said: "If something is possible then someone is going to try it. We have 50 to 100 years before this happens, and we need that much time to think about the ethical implications."

Recreating a dinosaur such as the Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived about 75 million years ago, would demand the recreation of at least 30,000 genes. But the knowledge that animals share common ancestors and that so few genes regulate so much body development could mean that most of the genes that programmed the growth of dinosaurs are interchangeable with those of today's chickens, aside from some essential changes of the scale of the final animal.

The purpose of the gene study was not, the scientists said, to recreate a Jurassic Park-style dinosaur, with all the problems that could follow.

Instead, they want to understand the process by which genes work together to create a body – so that they might be able to offer new medical treatments for human beings.

Cheng-Ming Chuong, a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said: "We want to learn how to grow an arm. We know nature learnt how over millions of years of trial and error, so that's what we study."