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- Posted: Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:48:57 +0000
xyre_silverfangs
Golden Dysprosium
Easy there, Sparky. I'm sure the misses will enjoy hearing about your feline fetish.
Besides, I meant chickens with scales instead of feathers. You'd eventually be able to engineer something like that, but it'd be easier to just take a lizard and make some changes from there.
Besides, I meant chickens with scales instead of feathers. You'd eventually be able to engineer something like that, but it'd be easier to just take a lizard and make some changes from there.
Psh. That shows how little you know. My wife would probably join me wink lol
Actually it'd be just as easy with both, cause both creatures have a direct connection to dinosaurs. Don't quote me here, however, I'm no geneticist.
Lizards actually aren't that closely related to dinosaurs. The closest living non-avian relatives to the dinosaurs are the crocodilians, which are more closely related to birds than they are to other reptiles.
The reason it would be easier to use a chicken than a lizard is that since chickens are descended from dinosaurs, they still have some ancestral dinosaur or dinosaur-like genes that are inactive but present. If a number of genes can be activated for things like tails, teeth, and scales, and turned off for things like beak production, you can have something closely resembling a dinosaur. A lizard does not have dinosaur ancestry, so a completely new body type would have to be created (there are major skeletal differences), and warm-bloodedness would have to be engineered, all some scratch. This is completely undoable with our current knowledge of genetics, which is why chickens are being used for these experiments (as can be seen in that awesome discovery channel special). Again, it's much easier to turn a few preexisting genes on or off than to engineer entirely new traits.
