Okay that’s fair, they didn’t accidentally do anything, but what they did was EXTREMELY COOL. They located a cluster of genes that were present in birds but NOT present in non-beaked creatures and then they turned it off.

And lo, the embryo’s beak instead formed like a snouted reptile. Pictured below: Left chicken embryo, right alligator embryo, middle… the altered chicken embryo with the cluster turned off:

The scientist, whose name is Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, responsible for creating the embryo did not have a desire or the approval to hatch the babies, which is why we, the public, do not have photos of resurrected dinosaurs, but they’ve said they believed the babies could have hatched and been fine.

This is all PARTICULARLY INTERESTING because scientists have also discovered how to cause scale cells to start to form into feathers. We’re not about to see plumed lizards any time soon, since the experiment only only sought to determine how proto-feathers might have started to evolve from scales, but it was still freaking cool!!

Basically we’re poking around learning how evolution really works, and that’s super exciting!!