Project Orpheus: A Tale of Blood and Feathers

Chapter 11: The Lunch

Anise was positively giddy. She had always dreamed of putting flesh to the creatures she had dug up, but it always seemed so distant. And here they were. A toothed, long tailed, lizard hipped non-avian dinosaur. Once on the outside of the display room, Noh got them off the tram and led them to the dinner she had prepared. The plan, Anise had been told, was to eat here, get as much of a tour of the facility as Noh would allow, and then fly the Super Plane to the park proper where they'd get to see the rest of the dinosaurs.

They each sat at the table, as a series of floating drones brought in and placed the dishes on the table, flying off with the silvered lids and into the shafts of piping designed for them to fit into.

"Those things were dinosaurs?" Steven asked. "They didn't look like dinosaurs."

"They are," Anise interjected. "Ornithomimids. How...how did you even do this?"

Dr. Noh took some of the salad, tonging some of it for herself with a smile as she explained.

"Well those guys were actually really simple. We just turned some of the genes that had been turned off when dinosaurs developed into birds back on. We also turned off some other, newer bird traits, and added a few genes to them here and there to effectively revive them."

"Wait, what? What do you mean, dinosaurs developed into birds?" Ashton asked.

Both Anise and Noh received a similar pang of despair upon hearing that.

"Yes, birds are dinosaurs. The only ones that survived the KT Extinction." Anise said.

Noh added, "without birds, this project wouldn't have been possible. The hidden secrets of the megadinos are hidden away in birds."

"But, surely, it can't be that alone?"

"You're absolutely right," Noh said "there was more. Our colleagues at Red Sand were able to figure out that amino acids leave traces in rocks. With proper chemical tracers, those decayed fragments of DNA can be reconstructed. Proper DNA, with even epigenetic information! Sadly, we have to destroy the fossils in the process, but a 1 gram of material - usually a single complete fossil bone - is usually enough to get everything we need for that individual."

"What if it doesn't?" Myrtle asked.

"What do you mean?"

Noh narrowed her eyes at her a bit, but she still cautiously at her food.

"What if you do not get all the DNA from a single bone?"

Noh put her fork down in her bowl, tapping her mouth a bit with a cloth to get some of the dressing off of her lips as she answered. "There's no point in destroying more of a specific specimen, but we can pick up the other data from other fossils, and it can be the missing info. If it isn't, we usually have a good enough idea of what's missing to fill it in with bird or crocodile DNA."

"Fill it in with?" Myrtle asked, a bit aghast. "You can't just randomly guess at these things!"

"We're not. Are you aware that some 50 to 60 percent of your DNA is shared with bananas?"

"Wait what?" Anise was already sort of lost.

"It's true. It turns out a large chunk of DNA codes for really simple, basic things, like processing sugar into energy or building multicellularity," she began "and another, even larger portion is non-coding, useless junk that takes up space and serves only to help answer the questions posed by phylogeny. After all, if these neutral mutations do nothing, then all they do is get passed down in those who survive because of their other traits." Noh continued. "There's nothing inherently saurian about the saurian gene to process sugar. We could, in theory, get that gene from a crocodile, an octopus, or even a tree, and it would do the same exact thing because it is the same exact thing."