Jack Horner is one of the world's best-known paleontologists.
He discovered his first dinosaur fossil when he was eight-years-old. Since then, he has made some of the most important dinosaur-related discoveries and written several books.
One of his key successes is having helped provide important evidence concerning the sociability of dinosaurs, and that they cared for their young.
He not only served as scientific adviser on all the Jurassic Park films - including the recently released Jurassic World - but he also helped to inspire the character of Dr Alan Grant, played by actor Sam Neill in the original film and its second sequel.
Jack Horner spoke to Jonathan McCrea on this week's Futureproof. You can listen back to the interview below:
In his book How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever, Horner has written about plans to recreate a dinosaur-like creature by genetically modifying the DNA of a chicken. He elaborated on this idea on Futureproof.
He told Jonathan, "we tried many times to get dinosaur DNA out of a dinosaur, and we did fail. We were just never able to find it. But living birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and in fact we classify as avian dinosaurs.
"We're basically looking for the genes that express particular features. [For example] we're looking at the beak, and at the point at which the beak changes from the dinosaur condition to the bird condition," he explained.
Jack said that you couldn't make any of these changes if evolution did not work, and "the whole point is to see if we can retro-engineer a dinosaur-like animal out of a modern living animal". He admits it is controversial, but he argued there is already a tendency to want to change animals we have, as is the case with many domestic animals.
He also went through how some of the pre-conceived ideas of dinosaurs have been challenged by discoveries during digs.
Jack said he would never tell young people "that Jurassic Park wouldn't be a reality... Bringing back precise species might be a little bit difficult, but I still think that one day we'll have dinosaurs".
