Charlie Stross has written a story, A Bird in Hand, which rather pushes a few boundaries. It’s about dinosaurs and sodomy, as the author’s backstory explains. And as everyone knows, every story is improved by adding one or the other of dinosaurs and sodomy, so it can’t help but be even better if you add both.
A note of caution, though: Charlie is really, really good at spinning out all the latest scientific buzzwords and deep molecular biological concepts into an extraordinarily plausible-sounding mechanism for rapidly recreating a dinosaur — it’s much, much better than Crichton’s painfully silly and superficial dino-blood-from-mosquitoes-spliced-with-frog-DNA BS — but I was a bit hung up on poking holes in it. It won’t be quite that easy, and it rather glibly elides all the trans-acting variations that have arisen in 70 million years and the magnitude of the developmental changes. But still, if we ever do manage to rebuild a quasi-dinosaur from avian stock, that’ll be sort of the approach that will be taken, I suspect. Just amplify the difficulty a few thousand fold.
Also, it’s way too technical to survive in the movie treatment.
So, pretty much the same breezy, overconfident descriptions as used in predicting the imminent arrival of the space elevator?
Yeah, but enjoy the story anyway.
I don’t know much about DNA synthesis, but I might read it to poke holes in the sodomy instead…
What would Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology say if someone pointed the story out to him? (Paging David M)
Needs more sodomy.
Not really related, but it reminds me of this take on dinosaurs and sodomy (and American puritanism).
Hehehe, Charles Stross is very good when it comes to plausible jargon. A side-affect of being an unrepentant geek/computer nerd/etc!
:)
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Pffft. To bring the dinosaurs back, we don’t need any epigeneticery-pokery.
We just need to raise millions and millions of a related animal — chickens, say — then remove their main predator and give them an environment similar to that in which the dinosaurs evolved. Convergent evolution should produce at least a few acceptable dinosauroids.
The first step is to make the Earth much warmer…
He didn’t italicize the Latin binomial. Pisses me off. Also, Cairina is too an anatid.
Whan is a duck not a duck?
OK, I see what I’ve been doing wrong all these years. Whenever I’ve needed to juice up a story, I’ve added Daffy Duck and bowling. Now my writing career will really take off.
I always thought that chocolate was sufficient.
To be fair, the frog thing was more Spielberg than Crichton. In the novel they spliced in DNA from several different animals in an attempt to grow viable organisms, only using frogs for a few species. It was the movie that had them just use frog DNA for everything.
Excellent. loved the Rocky Horror refs, too.
Naaah, I won’t alert Darren.
The story is a lot like JP in handwaving stuff away by technobabble, only more so. :-) And Bullockornis (and the other dromornithids) may have viciously ripped out the hearts of… palm trees; their diet, like that of Gastornis (including Diatryma), is still controversial.