This guy is interesting.  It’s not so much that he is trying to resurrect a dinosaur a la Jurassic Park; he is trying to get ancient, now-latent dinosaur genes to be expressed in bird development.  According to him, if he does manage to create "dinochicken," it would look like a dinosaur, but still be a chicken with all the same chicken genes.

Then again, a 10-foot tall chicken with teeth and grasping limbs is not a comforting thought, ha!

This should be a marvelous segment.  I don’t know how many get to Hell Creek in the badlands of Montana, where the elk and the coyotes play, but I think this is where the Horner diggings have taken place.  In my family we are big in paleontology - and if you also are, we find what we think is the best museum ever should be worth going out of your way.  Its about 80 miles east of Calgary, Alberta near Drumheller - in the Canadian badlands.  The Royal Tyrrell Museum.  It all seems in nowhere but the museum’s architecture - indoors and out - is probably one of the most striking I have seen anywhere.  You can watch through glass windows and see them working on dinosaur finds so slowly and carefully - and if you didn’t care that much when you opened those museum doors, you will find yourself immersed in paleontology before your visit is over.  I usually hesitate to tell anyone to go — but GO to this and years later, your still feel like a walking encyclopedia in all you so easily learned.

Lucky Lesley gets to have all the fun with Jack Horner!  How I would love to spend a day out in the Badlands dinosaur hunting with him!  Joan

Lesley

Forget the kids, I love this stuff.  I used to dig in the San Joaquin Valley in CA - Native Americans of course.  We had to dig the garbage pile.  It was a lucky assignment because I found a beautiful black obsidian small spear head, a beautiful chert scraper, shell beads and Spanish trade beads, but my favorite finds were abalone barbed fish hooks.  The Yokuts traded with the Chumas hence the abalone shell. Although aged, thin and fragile and almost light as air because they had dried so thin, they were still beautiful and full of human touch.  The sun glinted off the pink of the shell and it was easy to see that some ancient fish was as attracted as I was to it’s charms.