Jurassic Park & Chimerae

[Thomas_R_HOLTZ@umail.umd.edu (th81)]

The point I was trying to make in the previous article was that the
creatures formed, whatever they were, wouldn't be dinosaurs.  Even so, the
monster might be interesting in and of itself, but would probably shed
little to no light on dinosaurian biology.  There is a vast body of
research on pleiotropy (sp?) and multigenic traits showing that the one
gene - one character hypothesis is a great oversimplification.

Furthermore, from a phylogenetic standpoint, it would be more appropriate to
use birds rather than mammals to grow a dinosaur.  Note that under the line
of descent classification scheme, birds are members of Dinosauria anyway, so
if you want to see what dino DNA in action, just take up ornithology.  In
any case, mammals have some 300 or more million years divergence from the
sauropsid line, and so have acquired far too many traits to be useful in the
scheme suggested.  On the other hand, birds share in their genetic structure
the common DNA heritage of the Dinosauria, Theropoda, Coelurosauria,
Maniraptora, etc. (albeit expressed in a highly modified manner).