How to build a dinosaur...

Here's a nice, concise take on how Jack Horner proposes we can build a dinosaur:

Horner worked with the makers of “Jurassic Park,” one of my all-time favorite movie series. As you may recall, the plot of these movies revolved around the re-creation of dinosaurs by scientists who had manipulated DNA taken from blood removed from the tiny guts of mosquitoes who had bitten dinos, only to be encased in resin that over time hardened into amber.


The so-called building of a dinosaur proposed in Horner and Gorman’s book would be done differently, however. Horner has long claimed that birds are not only descended from dinosaurs, but are in fact dinosaurs themselves, and so possess the same genes as their nonavian dinosaur ancestors. (I love the term, used frequently in the book, “nonavian dinosaur.”) It’s simply a matter of triggering the switches that control whether teeth, a lengthy vertebrate tail and those funny little arms instead of wings will manifest themselves as the embryo develops.

Read the whole article here: MARTHA ALLEN: How to build a dinosaur.

This is quite similar to what happens in Little Birdies!, except ... well, I really don't want to give too much away. The book should be available within a week or so...