Jack proposes that birds are actually living dinosaurs but just look different. Birds lack long tails, their arms are wings instead of hands, they have a beak, and they are toothless.

This research project aims to retro-engineer a dinosaur-like animal from a bird. To do this, researchers must first look and study certain genes of ancestral birds. Once it is known which genes were turned on and off during the evolution of birds, certain genes can be turned off as part of the ‘Dino-Chicken’ retro-engineering process.

Many researchers are working on the evolution of birds, for example at Montana State University and McGill University. These important studies provide the critical data on various evolutionary genetic patterns, which further contribute to the very real possibility that there may one day be a ‘Dino-Chicken.’

Explore the facts about the “Dino Chicken Project” project in the November 2014 Washington Post article “Paleontologist Jack Horner is Hard at Work Trying to Turn a Chicken into a Dinosaur.”

The primary focus of Jack’s paleontological studies is dinosaur growth and behavior. Jack studies the growth of dinosaurs by looking at the internal microstructure of their leg bones. Like trees, the bones of animals record annual lines. By cutting through the bones and counting the lines, we can get a good idea of the animal’s age. The distances between the lines can also reveal the trajectory of an animal’s life—we can see its good times and its bad times.

Jack is also interested in how dinosaur skulls changed shape as the animals matured. The skulls of juvenile dinosaurs are very different from the skulls of adults; Jack hypothesizes that these differences are related to social behaviors. The juveniles of modern animals that live in social groups, such as birds and mammals, look very different from their parents. Dinosaurs had very similar characteristics, which suggests that many species of dinosaurs were as social as many species of birds. And like birds, some, if not all, dinosaurs nested in large colonies and traveled in large herds or aggregations.

One of Jack’s newest hypotheses is about the color of dinosaurs. Keratin is the hard substance that beaks of birds are made of, and there is now scientific evidence that keratin was present in a lot more of the skulls of dinosaurs than previously thought. Since keratin in birds can be very colorful, Jack believes that dinosaurs were much more vibrantly colored too – just like birds.

When Jack was curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, he created one of the largest field research programs in the world, sending out as many as nine field crews every season. Jack filled the museum with one of the largest collections of dinosaur remains in the United States. Even though Jack has retired from the museum, he continues to collect for the Burke Museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. Currently he is working with Dr. Greg Wilson at the Burke on the Hell Creek Project, which Jack initiated back in 1999, along with Bill Clemens of UC Berkeley and Joe Hartman at the University of North Dakota. They have accumulated the largest collection of paleontological specimens for any Mesozoic rock unit in the world; the gathering of additional specimens and data continues.

In the last decade, Jack recruited students from Mongolia to study and train at Montana State University. Now paleontologists in Mongolian institutions, they are working with Jack to promote paleontology research in their country. Jack aids his former students and postdocs by raising funds for research and collection space, and educational outreach. One of Jack’s primary interests is helping former student Badamkhatan Zorigt assemble the largest collection ever of a single species of dinosaur: the Psittacosaurus. To date, they have collected more than 400 specimens.

In addition to curating at the Museum of the Rockies, Jack also taught numerous courses at Montana State University, including “Origins and Texts and Critics, Imagination.” Currently a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, he teaches an honors class: “Origins: the origin of the Universe, Life and Consciousness”.