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After having been hidden away in a private collection for a decade-and-a-half, a new, extremely novel species of dinosaur has been discovered — and it’s one that’s odd-looking enough for researchers to have assumed at first that it might have been a fake. While its body resembles the infamous Velociraptor of Jurassic Park fame, it has a swan-like head and neck, and what appear to be penguin-like flippers, in place of the grasping arms that would typically be found on fossils like this.
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A renowned paleontologist and his team of pioneering geneticists are looking to genetically re-create a dinosaur, using DNA from a chicken. And no, we’re not lifting this story from a Steven Spielberg movie.

Paleontologist Jack Horner, of whom not only worked on the film "Jurassic Park" as a technical advisor, but also served as inspiration for one of the main characters, proposed his ‘chickenosaurus’ concept in his 2009 book, “How to Build a Dinosaur”. The idea is to use existing DNA found in modern chickens to regress features of the animal, so as to resemble a small dinosaur-like creature. Most birds still hold latent genes for the features previously exhibited by their reptilian ancestors.
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Extinction forms a natural part of the cycle of life. Around 50 million species currently exist on our planet but scientific research has indicated that, since life evolved on Earth, between 1 and 4 billion species could have blossomed into being only to die out and ultimately become extinct.
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Scientists are trying to bring extinct species back from the dead. Will they recreate something dangerous?

In the March 19th edition of the New York Times, Gina Kolata quotes geneticist George Church as saying, "Maybe we can no longer delay death, but we can reverse it."

So far only one extinct species has been brought back: A goat-like creature that went extinct in 1999. In 2003, it was cloned from frozen cells, but it lived only a few minutes. Cloning needs an intact cell, which, in an extinct species, may not exist. If it works, the embryo must be implanted in a closely related species.
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