Dinosaurs still exist, but in the form of birds, research

Where we thought dinosaurs were long dead, researchers now assert that they are alive and are around us, just not in their actual form.

Researchers from the University of Kent believe that they know what dinosaur DNA looks like and that it is all around us and we see these animals as part of our everyday life, in form of birds, which can be called as ‘modern day dinosaurs’.

It is believed that millions of years ago, a giant asteroid impact wiped out all of the dinosaurs except for the flying ones that developed to birds seen today. The birds seen today are the ancestors of those dinosaurs that survived, wrote BGR.

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Publishing their study in Nature Communications, scientists explained how tracing the roots of dinosaur DNA led them to this conclusion. Fossils have unearthed that many dinosaurs were covered in feathers and their skeletal structures have a lot in common with those of birds seen today.

Lead author Rebecca O'Connor said, expressed, “The fossil evidence and now our evidence reinforces the idea that rather than birds and dinosaurs being distant relatives, they are one in the same. The birds around us today are dinosaurs.”

Using mathematical techniques to identify the possible genetic traits, the team suggested that the dinosaur DNA was probably organized into chromosomes. Birds have about 80 of them, three times than that of humans. If dinosaurs also had a massive number of chromosomes, it might explain why they too came in different shapes and sizes, just like birds do.

“We think it generates variation. Having a lot of chromosomes enables dinosaurs to shuffle their genes around much more than other types of animals. This shuffling means that dinosaurs can evolve more quickly and so help them survive so long as the planet changed,” researcher Darren Griffin told the BBC.

Though these techniques might lead to more understanding of what dinosaur DNA was like, it still won’t enable us to recreate them. Professor Griffin said, “We are not going to have Jurassic Park anytime soon. If you take the DNA of a chicken and put it into an ostrich egg you won’t end up with a chicken or an ostrich. You will end up with nothing. The same would be true of a velociraptor or a T. rex. It just wouldn’t work.”