How To: Make a pet dinosaur

If you don't have a house in Vancouver to trade for a year of personal dinosaur services, but you still really want a dinosaur, perhaps you should consider science. But don't listen to Michael Crichton.

In this fun TEDTalks video, paleontologist Jack Horner (you may remember him as one of the researchers who thinks that triceratops might have actually been the juvenile form of torosaurus) talks about what you'd actually have to do to engineer yourself a living dinosaur. Lesson #1: Don't expect to find dino DNA in amber-preserved mosquitoes. As Horner puts it, "If you got something out of that insect, and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over … you'd have a room full of mosquitoes. And probably some trees."

Instead, as a more-realistic alternative, he suggests reverse-engineering a chicken.