Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking living descendants of the dinosaur (chickens) and genetically engineering them to reactivate ancestral traits — including teeth, tails, and even hands — to make a "Chickenosaurus".

Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken

Building a dinosaur from a chicken

Discovering 65-million-year-old heme, not DNA, in dinosaur fossils underscores the challenges and revelations in paleontology.

Engineering 'Chickenosaurus' by reactivating ancestral dinosaur traits in chickens offers a creative approach to studying evolution.

Turning to birds, the living descendants of dinosaurs, opens new avenues in understanding and potentially reconstructing ancient life.