The 'Jurassic World' Dinosaur May Creep Around Us In 10 Years: Scientist

One dinosaur called Indominous Rex in "Jurassic World" smashed the box office last weekend. It was a "fictitious chicken-based dinosaur that was created in a lab - an idea that is not so far-fetched," says a famed dinosaur hunter.

As people says: "But in a classic case of life imitating art, Horner says that the genetic engineering angle of the Jurassic World plot gave him an idea: What if the best way to produce a dinosaur is by reversing evolution?"

"Chickens and all birds are carrying much bigger chunks of dinosaur DNA than we are ever likely to find in the fossil record," said James Horner, the inspiration for the original Jurassic Park's Alan Grant.

Even as 'fossilized DNA' is not available, the secret coding of dinosaurs is available at Colonel Sanders, according to livescience.

Horner established his work on Maiasaura fossils in the 1980s, talking about their behaviour. He explained that Tyrannosaurus Rex was a scavenger, not a hunter. In his lab at Montana State University, he was experimenting with bird DNA changes for ten years. Even as he has been an adviser to the "Jurassic Park" franchise, he explains that it is not possible to do what author Michael Crichton's original idea explained---the creation of dinosaurs from intact, fossilized DNA.

"DNA is an enormous molecule, made from trillions of pieces, held together in a cell nucleus by chemistry. As soon as the cell dies, that chemistry shuts down, and this molecule, which is very fragile, starts to come apart," Horner said.

As it was a very quick process, he added: "We don't think that there would be anything left after millions of years."

Even Indominous Rex, the huge dinosaur in "Jurassic World," can't be created in the lab soon. "It's all about form," he said. "Size is something we can work on at another time. But lots of dinosaurs were little."

Even making a poodle-sized T. rex will not be possible, he said. "The proof of concept has been accomplished," Horner said. "We can get teeth into a bird and just recently a team from Yale and Harvard have managed to retro-engineer [a bird's] beak back into a dinosaur-looking mouth. So we basically have the tail to reinstate, and to transform the wings back into an arm and hand."

In "Jurassic World," the massive Indominous Rex is shown as very intelligent and sly. How possible is this in a real-world program?

"Regarding intelligence, we really don't understand it very well. We are very mammal-centric - that our way of thinking is the best way to do it. Yet we have absolutely no idea how other kinds of animals think or process information," Horner said. "With the Indominous rex, we've taken ... the different characteristics from different animals and combined them together. Obviously, if you took some of the processing characteristics from other kinds of animals you would get a better thinker."

Even making a pet T.Rex could be done. "We already make transgenic animals," he said. "We make glowfish, you can go get one at the pet store. That's a transgenic animal - a zebra fish that has had glow genes from jellyfish implanted into the embryo during development that makes it glow in the dark. We have that proof of concept, so we know we can make transgenic animals."

The advantages of these experiments are many. "Learning how to switch genes on and off and figuring out what different genes do will have tremendous application in medical fields and into many other areas as well, including making better food," Horner said.

A small dinosaur may be ready in 10 years, though it can't be certain. "We might find a couple of these genes tomorrow or it might take 10 years," Horner said. "There is just no way to predict."

Putting together the genetice puzzle could be in spurts, not in a linear way.

It's possible to make them if we work fast, he said. Researchers are putting parts together in McGill University, Harvard, Yale and others.

"It's becoming a global thing, which is good," Horner said. "I don't care if I'm the first person to come up with it ... it doesn't matter to me who comes up with it."