Why is your water glass trembling? It can’t possibly be caused by earth-rattling T-rex footsteps like in the 1993 classic film Jurassic Park, right? Guess again.
For the past five years, the Graduate Evolutionary Biology and Ecology Students (GrEBES) at the University of Oregon have hosted a series of seminars related to its field. This year the topic is “De-extinction: There and Back Again.”
The first seminar will be held on Wednesday, April 6 at 7 p.m. in 150 Columbia Hall and will feature Dr. Jack Horner, the paleontologist who inspired the character Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park. He will speak about the possibility of creating dinosaurs and unicorns in real life. Widely known for his TED Talk viewed by millions, Dr. Horner’s speech will bring your childhood fantasies back to life, but this time validated by empirical data and research.
These free admission seminars will focus on the possibility of de-extinction, a phenomenon brought to the public eye through Jurassic Park, but based off of actual research done in part by Dr. Horner, who is also a professor of paleontology at Montana State University. Horner believes that he can create a “chickenosaurous” which uses the ancestral dinosaur DNA that still lingers in modern day chickens.
The spring seminar series is expected to bring in a lot of attention and excitement, in part because of public fascination with dinosaurs, but also because GrEBES is bringing three preeminent scholars and scientists to speak about the plausibility and ethicality of bringing dinosaurs out of extinction.
The second event of this three part adventure will be held on Wednesday, April 27 at 7 p.m. in 182 Lillis Hall and will be hosted by Dr. Hank Greely, the director of Law and the biosciences at Stanford University. He will be discussing the many ethical implications of de-extinction: how to treat chicken ancestors is one thing, but if modern science could bring back our own hominid ancestors, scientific testing and research meets a very sticky, very important ethical wall that Dr. Greely hopes to face along with several other topics relating to de-extinction.
Then on Wednesday May 4, Dr. Hendrik Poinar will be in 182 Lillis Hall at 7 p.m. discussing the possibility of bringing back the wooly mammoth. Professor of physical anthropology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, Poinar is an expert in the wooly mammoth genome and believes that mammoths were still roaming the earth around the time the pyramids of Egypt were being built.
These three brilliant scholars will ease the information into our modern minds while inspiring us with mesmerizing ideas of the prehistoric landscape. Be sure to attend any or all of this year’s spring seminar series as they will indubitably blow your mind out of this world, perhaps even to a land before time.
Check out Dr. Horner’s TED Talk about creating a dinosaur out of chicken DNA below: