Birds may be paedomorphic dinosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Birds may be paedomorphic dinosaurs

whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com

45 pointstokenadult15 comments

Also, let's not forget that, in cladistics taxonomy (virtually the only one used by scientists in scientific journals), birds are dinosaurs.

Dinosauria (dinosaurs) -> Saurischia (three-pronged hips) -> Theropoda (bipedal saurischians) -> Tetanurae (stiff tails) -> Coelosauria (birds, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc.) -> Maniraptora (hand snatchers) -> Avialae (bird wings) -> Euornithes (bird tails) -> Aves (birds)

There was a really nice article by Stephen Jay Gould about the paedomorphism of Mickey Mouse; it can be found online (in PDF) http://athmarc.allthingshuman.net/images/PDFs/mickey.pdf

It's a different discussion though; Mickey Mouse is a human creature; in order to appeal to a broader audience it "was evolved" to retain juvenile features.

Birds used paedomorphism for different reasons of course, but it is true that we find them more cute and less threatening than dinosaurs.

My daughter just asked me Sunday what group birds belong to, I'm looking forward to seeing her expression when I tell her "dinosaurs".

Does that mean that an existing bird DNA can be minimally edited to express into a more lifesize dinosaur?

Birds, being dinosaurs and having the size they have, already are lifesize dinosaurs, no DNA editig required.

As to the question you probably meant to ask, no editing the DNA of a living organism to match the unknown DNA of an extinct organism it separated from a 100 Million years ago is impossible.

And here we see the importance of commas, why you shouldn't separate the negative from the verb by a mile and the difference between "no editing ... is impossible" - all edits are possible and "no, editing ... is impossible" - the edits are impossible.

That what first crossed my mind (because of theory of Polymorphism that I'm developing) , but maybe not because genetic mutation over time may have damaged the necessary DNA. Possibliy you can switch some gene and get deformed lifesize dinosaur.

Paleontologist Jack Horner is trying to do exactly that; see his TED talk "Building a dinosaur from a chicken" -- http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fro...

I wonder what's the likelihood of an actual dinosaur's survival in our current atmosphere. Oxygen levels might just be not high enough.

That's a great point; hadn't considered that myself before. I guess you could construct a chamber with the proper atmosphere, though, without too much difficulty. At the very least, it seems like an easier problem to solve than the whole bringing a dinosaur to life thing anyway.

Some birds already look & feel quite close e.g. cassowaries have a claw on their (degenerate) wings.

I thought the classic example of paedomorphism was domesticated dogs. Research has shown that if you take wild foxes and select for non-aggression towards humans, after several generations, you end up with essentially foxes that retain their juvenile features and bear a strong resemblance to domesticated dogs. (Floppy ears, shorter snout, spotted fur, earlier sexual maturity, etc) You get all these physical features by simply selecting for tameness.

Jurassic Park taught us about this nearly 20 years ago!

so men did walk with dinosaurs after all :)

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