Do whales have the genes for making legs and chickens have the genes to make teeth?

I've heard someone say this, is that correct?





Whales have a gene for making legs and chickens have genes for making teeth?Do whales have the genes for making legs and chickens have the genes to make teeth?
Yes. To be technical, they always have the gene. It's just normally off in that particular tissue while it is still on in others. Sometimes it reverts to its old role as well.





Chicken with archosaur teeth:


http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/200鈥?/a>





Dolphin with leg stubs:


http://www.puppstheories.com/forum/image鈥?/a>Do whales have the genes for making legs and chickens have the genes to make teeth?
This is a difficult question, although whales technically do have legs. They are vestigial (useless) parts of the skeleton that have some bones of a leg and foot but are contained entirely within the soft tissue of the cetacean. Whales are mammals, having evolved from terrestrial organisms returning to the sea some fifty or so million years ago. So, for whales, the answer is ';yes'; although they are not useful.





For chickens, it is difficult to answer because the parts of the chicken genome that code for specific traits have not been fully decoded. We know about protein formation and expression, development of the embryo to fetus to egg, and some details about how these relate to different codes expressed in DNA patterns. Scientists have also noted that much of the genome appears to be ';junk';; that is, it does not clearly code for anything easily understood like ';lips'; or ';eye color'; or ';dentition';. It is entirely possible that these unknown sequences code for specific traits that evolved over time and fell into disuse, like teeth for a chicken.
Many whales have no pelvis, but a dolphin with hind flippers which would be leg bones has been found.





Scientists have turned on a chicken gene which causes tooth formation.
yes. whales today do still have vestigial leg bones, and there have been mutant toothed chicken. genes for these were never lost but through evolution there has been novel changes to these genes regulation.
I doubt this - these genes have changed to support other evolved structures most likely. Like beaks in birds and flippers and tales in whales.