What's New With Dinosaurs This Week?

Migrating dinos, Jurassic Park on Blu-Ray, and a paleontologist who wants to create a dinosaur out of chicken DNA.

We here at The Mark never really got over the dinosaur phase of our youth, and for good reason: dinosaurs are frickin' cool. And today we find out, for the first time, that some of them migrated great distances – as much as 300 kilometres – to find food. Geologist Henry Ficke concludes in a paper published this week that the camarasaurus, a 20-metre long sauropod (think brontosaurus) that weighed 20 tonnes and lived 140 million years ago, schlepped from the Great Plains across what is now the western United States to the mountains in pursuit of food. The dinosaurs apparently also travelled in herds, and moved with the seasons to snack on leaves throughout the western U.S. Ficke's research is the first to show that dinosaurs migrated to find food, much like bison, caribou, elephants and other herbivores found throughout the world today.

Also in dinosaur news, the paleontologist that advised Stephen Spielberg while he made Jurassic Park (out on Blu-Ray DVD for the first time this week!) is trying to recreate some of that movie magic by making a dinosaur out of a chicken. Jack Horner tells The Telegraph that he's studying how to genetically engineer a dinosaur out of chicken DNA, as birds are direct descendants of the reptiles that ruled the earth millions of years ago.

Nick Collins reports: "By flicking a few genetic switches in the laboratory – identifying genes that cause a bird-like characteristic and deactivating them – it should be possible to create a chicken that has arms and claws in place of wings.

'We are looking for ancestral genes, to turn them back on again to make a bird more like a dinosaur,' Horner explains. 'And since birds already are dinosaurs, it will be a dinosaur by definition.'"

Horner hopes to have the project done by the end of the decade, and wants his little pet to develop teeth, a tail, "and any other dinosaur-like qualities that his team can give it." So it might not be a velociraptor or a Tyrannosaurus rex (and probably for the better, what with them being ruthless killing machines and all), but this dino-chicken could at least make for great dinner time conversation. Plus, if it's as tasty as chicken, we know we'd be the first to line up to taste us some genetically modified, freak-of-nature dino meat. You would, too.