Birds To Dinosaur: February 2015

With what we know now about the tangled web of life, "Paleontologist Jack Horner is hard at work trying to turn a chicken into a dinosaur".

In 2009, the world’s most famous paleontologist made a bold claim. In “How to Build a Dinosaur,” Jack Horner proposed re-creating a small dinosaur by reactivating ancient DNA found in its descendants, chickens.
Horner and his team have been working on the “chickenosaurus” and moving ahead the science of evolutionary development. The project has already resulted in some of the first research into the embryonic development of tails.
(Source)

That may be, but did Mr. Horner separate and isolate specific chromosomes belonging to a dozen or more cross-breeders from the Chicken's ancestry, first?

Q. Does bird mating ever cross the species line?

A. “Many birds occasionally mate with members of other bird species, producing hybrid offspring,” said Irby J. Lovette, director of the Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In fact, Dr. Lovette said, about 10 percent of the world’s 10,000 bird species are known to have bred with another species at least once, either in the wild or in captivity. For example, in the eastern United States, NATIVE BLACK DUCKS have hybridized so often with the more abundant MALLARD DUCKS that PURE BLACK DUCKS HAVE BECOME RARE. Hybridization tends to occur between species that are closely related, Dr. Lovette said, but an individual from ONE GENUS may occasionally form a pair with a bird from an altogether DIFFERENT GENUS, separated by many millions of years of evolutionary divergence. Some groups of birds are particularly prone to hybridization, he said, adding: “Experienced bird watchers know to watch out for the occasional hybrid gull or duck that exhibits an odd mix of its parents’ colors and behaviors. Often, however, hybrids die young, and even when hybrid offspring survive until adulthood, they may be sterile or have trouble attracting mates.”
(Source)

What kind of a Frankenstein abomination is he prepared to bring into the world? Also, exactly how many chromosomes did T. Rex have? What genetic information was lost during these crossbreeding events? Surely these answers can be provided since Horner presumes he knows more than any legitimate scientist does about the current state of knowledge about dinosaur DNA.
Whatever abomination he attempts to create will NOT be "the" or even "an" ancestor of a Chicken.
A chicken's DNA is a genetic mosh pit ... a "Tangled Web" of genes derived from many ancestors... many of those crossbreeding from outside their species and... in some cases... beyond the boundaries of the species.

DINOSAURS: MOVIES VS. REALITY
"...We must sequence the DNA — find out what the genetic code of the animal is. That's several billion letters strung together in a chain. One gap in the chain could possibly ruin the whole thing. In the Jurassic Park stories, frog DNA is used to plug the holes in the DNA. This is really silly! As paleontological critics have remarked, "too much frog DNA and your T. rex croaks." A reasonably intact dinosaur genome is necessary to progress further — putting together DNA is a lot harder than reconstructing a dinosaur skeleton from its bones, and that's plenty hard. The odds of correctly assembling a fragmentary genome are similar to putting a million-piece puzzle together with your eyes closed. DNA allows some room for mistakes (not all DNA is used), but it doesn't seem likely that we could get enough for any one animal.
If we somehow got a whole dinosaur genome, we would somehow have to make it assemble into chromosomes, which we don't know how to do with dinosaur DNA. That might be able to be accomplished with a few decades of work. Here comes the zinger. These chromosomes now would have to be implanted into a compatible, living, intact egg. Crocodile eggs, or even eggs of the same dinosaur genus, would not work. In vertebrates, the same (or at least closely related) species' egg and cytoplasm apparently are required for the egg to develop normally. The major problem here is that we just have the DNA — we don't know what species we have (DNA doesn't come with nametags), and even if we did we don't have a living dinosaur egg of that species!"
(Source)

The Tangled Web vs. The Tree of Life

The idea that birds are descended from dinosaurs is no longer questioned [(THIS CLAIM IS CERTAINLY NOT TRUE!)] ... Paleontologists have long studied the changes in bone structure of dinosaurs and birds over time. Meanwhile, molecular biologists have studied the composition of modern bird genes. By merging these scientists’ work, Horner, who is curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., hopes to answer questions about evolution.
Horner’s premise can be viewed from the launchpad of the late Michael Crichton’s novel and film “Jurassic Park,” a story that involved obtaining dinosaur DNA from undigested blood in mosquitoes preserved in amber. The idea of finding dinosaur DNA this way was taken seriously by many people, and the possibility was explored by scientists.
Jack Horner knows the “Jurassic Park” theory very well, having served not only as the inspiration for one of the main characters but also as a technical adviser for the film. But 24 years after the novel was published, we have yet to find any DNA in mosquitoes from the time of the dinosaurs.
DNA degrades under even ideal storage conditions. Cool, sterile conditions can extend its useful life to as long as perhaps a few million years, and dinosaurs disappeared about 65 million years ago. No matter how perfect a mosquito we find in a blob of amber, we cannot make a dinosaur out of that mosquito’s last blood meal.
(Source)

So, SCIENCE FICTION and Frankenstein experiments is what paleontology has been reduced to, leaving a legacy of speculation, vs. actual fossil facts.

Evolution: Charles Darwin was wrong about the tree of life
Evolutionary biologists say crossbreeding between species is far more common than previously thought, making a nonsense of the idea of discrete evolutionary branches

Charles Darwin's "tree of life", which shows how species are related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolise the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But modern genetics has revealed that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading, with scientists saying a more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an impenetrable thicket. Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a "tangled bank".
"We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality," Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told New Scientist magazine.
Genetic tests on bacteria, plants and animals increasingly reveal that different species crossbreed more than originally thought, meaning that instead of genes simply being passed down individual branches of the tree of life, they are also transferred between species on different evolutionary paths. The result is a messier and more tangled "web of life".
Microbes swap genetic material so promiscuously it can be hard to tell one type from another, but animals regularly crossbreed too - as do plants - and the offspring can be fertile. According to some estimates, 10 per cent of animals regularly form hybrids by breeding with other species.
Last year, scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington found a strange chunk of DNA in the genetic make-up of eight animals, including the mouse, rat and the African clawed frog. The same chunk is missing from chickens, elephants and humans, suggesting it must have become wedged into the genomes of some animals by crossbreeding.
The findings mean that to link species by Darwin's evolutionary branches is an oversimplification. "The tree of life is being politely buried," said Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine. "What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change."

(Source)

Charles Darwin wrong: Modern scientists debunk Darwin's 'Tree of Life' diagram
Charles Darwin's “tree of life,” which shows how species are purportedly related through evolutionary history, is wrong and needs to be replaced, according to leading scientists, reports I4U News on May 16.

The tree of life is a metaphor used to describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct. Its use dates back to at least the early 1800s. It was employed by Charles Darwin to express the concept of the branching divergence of varieties and then species in a process of common descent from ancestors.
The great naturalist first sketched how species might evolve along branches of an imaginary tree in 1837, an idea that quickly came to symbolize the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Modern scientists and geneticists are now saying that representing evolutionary history as a tree is misleading. A more realistic way to represent the origins and inter-relatedness of species would be an “impenetrable thicket.”
Darwin himself also wrote about evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank.”

(Source)

If you thought the web couldn't get any more tangled, sticky and complicated then consider the "Death and Resurrection Theory".

Are Butterflies Two Different Animals in One? The Death And Resurrection Theory

Here's a dangerous, crazy thought from an otherwise sober (and very eminent) biologist, Bernd Heinrich. He's thinking about moths and butterflies, and how they radically change shape as they grow, from little wormy, caterpillar critters to airborne beauties. Why, he wondered, do these flying animals begin their lives as wingless, crawling worms? Baby ducks have wings. Baby bats have wings. Why not baby butterflies?
His answer — and I'm quoting him here — knocked me silly.
"[T]he radical change that occurs," he says, "does indeed arguably involve death followed by reincarnation."
"In effect, the animal is a chimera, an amalgam of two, where the first one lives and dies ... and then the other emerges."
What he's saying is, while a moth appears to be one animal, with a wormy start and a flying finish, it's actually two animals — two in one! We start with a baby caterpillar that lives a full life and then dies, dissolves. There's a pause. Then a new animal, the moth, springs to life, from the same cells, reincarnated.
According to this theory, long, long ago, two very different animals, one destined to be wormy, the other destined to take wing, accidently mated, and somehow their genes learned to live side-by-side in their descendants. But their genes never really integrated. They are sharing a DNA molecule like two folks sharing a car, except half way through the trip, one driver dissolves and up pops his totally different successor. Driver No. 2 emerges from the body of driver No. 1.
When this theory was first proposed (not by Bernd, but by an English zoologist), eminent scientists scoffed.

(Source)

Crossbreeding is very common. It is Evolution.

These Hybrid Animals Will Be Created Because Of Climate Change
Are hybrid species being created due to climate change?
"...Like mules, the male version of the hybrid is infertile, but female dzo, or dzomo, are fertile, allowing for the “back breeding” of three-quarter mixes."
10 Farm Animal Hybrids You Didn’t Know Existed
Hybrid (biology) and Hybrid (biology)
"...But of course, stable hybrids are found in the wild, no matter how distressing that idea is to armchair theorists. For example, DNA research has proven what has always been suspected -- that the Eastern Red Wolf in the U.S. is nothing more than a stable hybrid of a Grey Wolf and a Coyote."
"...As I noted a while back in a post about species loss, a good case can be made that more species are provably being created every year than being driven to extinction. To be clear, I am not saying that species extinction is not a very, very serious problem, only that we should at least mention that useful species and subspecies are being created every day, and in every key type: fur, fin and feather. In the history of the world, I am pretty sure the creation of the leghorn chicken is more important than the loss of a subspecies of finch found only on one isolated atoll in the Pacific.
Several examples of speciation (it is a process, not an event) can be found in the world of falconry, where advances in aviary management and artificial insemination have resulted in all kinds of hybrids, such as Gyr/Peregrine and Gyr/Saker crosses that are not only fertile, but which combine the useful characteristics of one species (such as the speed of the Peregrine) with the useful characteristics of another (such as the size and strength of the Gyrfalcon).
The first hybrid falcons were produced in 1971 in western Ireland when falconers Ronald Stevens and John Morris put a male Saker into a moulting mew with a female peregrine. The two young falconers were quite astonished when the birds mated and produced viable hybrid chicks.
Soon other hybrids were being produced, revealing both the extreme plasticity and suspect nature of raptor classification."
(Source)
Not all cross-breeding results in negative outcomes.
"...The fact that the hybrid origin of the mule has so long been known, together with its marked sterility, has no doubt greatly contributed to the widespread, but erroneous, belief that all hybrids are sterile. Early naturalists (e.g., Prichard 1836, p. 140) believed that mules foaled more frequently in warmer climes."
Mules (Donkey × Horse), Equus asinus × Equus caballus, Mammalian Hybrids
Cross-breeds of Kenyan ruminants help farmers cope with climate change
Lebanese scientists are "breeding" to counteract climate change

What we see before us, is the onset of another Mass Extinction.

Brown Polar Bears, Beluga-Narwhals and Other Hybrids Brought to You by Climate Change
Animals with shrinking habitats are interbreeding, temporarily boosting populations but ultimately hurting species' survival
Evolution of Polyploid Triticum Wheats under Cultivation: The Role of Domestication, Natural Hybridization and Allopolyploid Speciation in their Diversification
Global Warming Spawns Hybrid Species
"...the rate at which species interbreed is accelerating because of climate change, researchers say. As habitats and animal ranges change and bleed into one another, species that never before would have encountered one another are now mating. Warmer temperatures have allowed grizzly bears and polar bears to venture to habitats they don’t usually occupy and mate to form a hybrid: the pizzly or grolar bear.
Similar trends have been observed between golden-winged warblers and blue-winged warblers.
“This issue is horrendously complex because of our ability to change the environment,” said Arnold.
Considering that human activity has indirectly brought together species through planetary warming and increased fossil fuel emissions, the question on the minds of many biologists like Arnold is whether humans should play a role in preventing hybridization like this. A threat to genetic diversity?
Montana’s Flathead Basin has long been a spawning haven for the westslope cutthroat trout. But as waters in the region warm, rainbow trout have swum up from the western lakes where they were introduced decades ago to cutthroat native grounds."
Combining the strengths of coyotes and wolves
However, some biologists disagree, saying that hybridization is natural and doesn’t always produce negative results. In some cases, hybrids are better adapted to cope with changing landscapes.
“Hybridization can increase genetic diversity in some cases,” said Tallmon.
A coyote-wolf-dog hybrid that made its way to western New York in the 1940s has the combined features of stealthy coyote-like movements and a larger skull, making it better-adapted to hunting white-tailed deer.
Members of the Heliconius butterfly genus in the Amazon breed with other species within the genus and have developed more distinctive colors in the process. Without these colors, the birds would not be aware that these butterflies contain cyanide, and the defense mechanism would be useless.
Though crossbreeding between Amazonian butterflies was not triggered by climate change, it is an example of hybridization that strengthens the survival abilities of a species.
(Source)
With climate change, species are increasingly interbreeding to survive
"...Other researchers see hybridization differently, though — as a shortcut to the kind of evolution that has benefited organisms since time immemorial. By this view, hybridization threatens some species but enables others to survive and prosper. As scientists scrutinize genomes, the old idea of separate, radiating species — an ever-diverging tree of life — has come to be understood as more of a tangled web, says Michael L. Arnold, research professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Georgia and the author of Evolution Through Genetic Exchange. Living things evolve into new species only to cross again and again."
(Source)

Hybrids can often go on to reproduce, and introduce new genetic information into the species.

"...The world's only known whale-dolphin mix has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday.
The calf was born on Dec. 23 to Kekaimalu, a mix of a false killer whale and an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Park officials said they waited to announce the birth until now because of recent changes in ownership and operations at the park. Kekaimalu has given birth to two other calves. One lived for nine years and the other, born when Kekaimalu was very young, died a few days after birth.
Park researchers suspect the wholphin's father is an 8-foot long Atlantic bottlenose dolphin named Mikioi."
(Source)

"...This is one confusing animal. Related to the rhinoceros, called a mountain cow, and with a flexible nose like an elephant, Baird's tapirs have to be seen to be believed."
(Source)

Elephant try to cross couple with Rhino

Speciation through Hybridization

Macroevolution is defined as a major evolutionary transition from one type of organism to another occurring at the level of the SPECIES and higher taxa.
This event (described) could have happened just as easily through Natural Selection as Artificial Selection.
New species come and go every day on the planet.
(Source): New Species and Forms of Cereals Derived from Hybridization between Wheat and Couch Grass N. V. Tsitsin and V. F. Lubimova The American Naturalist Vol. 93, No. 870 (May - Jun., 1959), pp. 181-191 Published by: The University of Chicago Press for The American Society of Naturalists Viewing page 181 of pages 181-191

Consider this too. We do not have perfectly preserved, intact dinosaur DNA... much less, a single species "Genome". DNA does not preserve over 65 million years (that is merely counting dinosaurs that died during the Cretaceous).

A recap of the fossil record and just how far back, to find the "Ancestor" of Birds, which Horner claims he attempts to resurrect:

Here's the result of what 13 MILLION YEARS of divergence can do to chromosomes:

"....Each of the four species of ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, bonobo, and orangutan) possesses 48 chromosomes or 24 pairs, compared to the 46 chromosomes of humans...."

However, Horner does not think to attempt resurrecting a "common ancestor" between birds and *whatever* archosaur, a mere 13 million years ago:

Human and Chimp Genes May Have Split 13 Million Years Ago "...The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees may have begun genetically diverging from one another 13 million years ago, more than twice as long ago as had been widely thought, shedding new light on the process of human evolution, researchers say. Scientists also discovered that male chimps pass on far more genetic mutations to their offspring than male humans do, revealing previously unknown evolutionary differences between the species." (Source)

"...previously unknown differences..."

Really? But can't Horner predict the varying mutation rates of extinct 100 Million Year old Dinosaurs and primitive birds?

If the speculative claims and promises of this Frankenstein experiment actually held water, surely some human would've already resurrected the "Common Ancestor" of Humans and Chimps. After all, we have the extant DNA from living Humans and Chimps and other primates!
Bet if they did... they'd still get an ABOMINATION that doesn't correctly represent that common ancestor at all. It would not look the same, behave the same, it would probably be sickly and missing crucial genetic information that was lost millions of years ago, and cross-breeding through the ages introducing new genetic information while old genetic information disappeared.

Horner's evil experiment is... folly.
You would have more luck, at cloning my "Grandmother," -- using my genes, my siblings' genes, my cousins' genes, and so on... you would NOT even come close to my "grandmother". Not in likeness, appearance or temperance. You would have a human -- but you would not have succeeded to resurrect my ancestor!

Horner's trying to resurrect a creature that is far older than 65 MILLION years.. and sadly, never even existed. Keep in mind, birds were around during the time of the Jurassic (long before T. Rex and Velociraptor) Jurassic birds were alive and well and doing what birds do, as far back as the Jurassic ... so Horner proposes to resurrect a "dinosaur" or Archosaur ancestor that dates back beyond 150 million years in geological time?
Purely speculative folly!!! This is not Science. It is simply junk science. It is a flawed attempt at playing God.

Jurassic period dates back to 199.6 to 145.5 million years ago... we know there's no DNA available to even test against Horner's silly hypothesis.. WHAT A HUGE WASTE OF RESEARCH GRANT MONEY THAT COULD HAVE ACTUALLY BEEN PUT TO FAR BETTER USE, ELSEWHERE. :-(

Genetic Similarity Between Birds and Crocodiles

Messy, Tangled Web of Evolution vs. Darwin's Orderly Diversifying Tree

The Tangled Web vs. The Tree of Life