At the University of Oregon, researcher Joe Thornton and his colleagues are busy "raising the dead," says Nature News' Helen Pearson. Thornton analyzes proteins that are hundreds of millions of years old in an attempt to better understand how organisms evolved. "Thornton is a leader in a movement to do for proteins what the scientists in Jurassic Park did for dinosaurs: bring ancient forms back to life, so that they can be studied in the flesh," Pearson says.