Are you a ferocious T. rex — or just chicken?

This has led the whimsical Horner to propose that a real Jurassic Park (are you entrepreneurs listening?) might feature a "chickenosaurus" as an attraction.

This might not equal the punch of a real T. rex running amok and eating lawyers and threatening children, or packs of viciously intelligent velociraptors scrambling between the legs of majestic brontosauruses, but those sharp little chicken teeth might hurt like heck if they grabbed onto a finger.

Actual T. rex DNA did not survive the eons, though since DNA is what provides the instructions for making proteins, scientists can make educated suppositions of what the DNA sequence might have looked like.

My own investigation into my inner T. rex/chicken is an offshoot of the book I'm writing, Experimental Man: The Ultimate High-Tech Exam, in which I'm having scientists run extensive tests on my genes (and other parts of my body).

It is a writer-as-guinea-pig effort that allows me a personal perspective from which to describe and assess the latest science and technologies that are striving to tell us more about our health and our bodies past, present, and future.

Horner and others are helping me tell the story of evolution contained in our genes. Certain genes and other DNA sequences have been passed down to humans and other modern organisms from the age of the dinosaurs, and beyond.

As part of my "exam" into genes inside us, I asked molecular biologist Nathaniel David to compare the T. rex protein fragments to the human Type I collagen protein. David is chief science officer of Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, a Los Angeles biotech company developing drugs based on, among other things, manipulating collagen.

David was disappointed by the smallness of the fragments but was impressed by their similarity to human sequences in collagen.

"The recovered dinosaur-protein fragments were short (less than 20 amino acids in length) while the human-collagen protein is over 1,000 amino acids in length," he wrote in an email. Amino acids are what proteins are made of. "But those we had were either perfect matches or different at only one amino acid position."

Below is a comparison of one of the 68-million-year-old T. rex fragments to the human collagen sequence; each letter below represents an amino acid:

T-rex:   GATGAPGIAGAPGFPGAR
You: GAPGAPGIAGAPGFPGAR

The only difference is a single amino acid, T (bolded), meaning that the T. rex-derived fragment contained a threonine amino acid at that position, while humans have a proline.

However, as David said, these 18 amino acids tell an incomplete story about the evolutionary similarity of human and T. rex Type I collagen, a protein over 1,000 amino acids in length in humans, and in chickens — and presumably in T-rexes.

"We would need more of the protein to compare to the human to see how this protein has changed in evolution," said David, "or even better, the DNA. But DNA just isn't chemically stable enough for a Jurassic Park-style comparison."

The next step in my dino-quest is to compare this mini-stretch of T. rex protein — and its possible genetic code — to my own collagen protein. This may differ from the reference human protein used by David, which is posted online.

I already know that, like most humans, I share 60 percent of my genes with the modern version of a T. rex — a chicken. I'll soon be finding out how I personally came out on the T. rex-and-chicken question.

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