Question: I once saw on television that scientist's are trying to recreate the veloceraptor using chick embryo's. Curriently they have managed to add 7 vertebrae onto the end of the spinal cord and have also added teeth, but havent managed to be able to keep the embryo alive. Is it possible to keep it alive as it forms until it is ready to hatch?

Artem Evdokimov answered on 20 Jun 2012:

Good question. Two relevant points: firstly the scientist (Larsson) is not trying to re-create a dinosaur, he is trying to make a chicken embryo that *looks like* a dinosaur. This is similar to putting an actor into a ‘fat suit’ – inside it is still the same person, but it looks different from the outside. So, the chicken does not really become a raptor, merely looks a bit like one. The second point is that so far the embryos do not survive, and that’s actually useful to the researcher because if they did this would present a significant ethical concern and the animals would have to be euthanized anyway. In general, I suspect with enough work this sort of ‘dino-chicken’ could be made to survive gestation, however it’s a very difficult undertaking because the genes that are being manipulated are likely to also be involved in a number of important and poorly understood developmental processes.