Chickens Wear Prosthetic Dinosaur Tails, For Science

Thursday, February 6, 2014 - 17:10 in Paleontology & Archaeology

The humble chicken is distantly related to the T. rex. This raises an important scientific question: How could we make chickens walk like they're little dinosaurs? A new study provides the equally important answer! And also video!  Researchers from the Universidad de Chile wanted to study dinosaur strutting, but there being few dinosaurs available, stuck a prosthetic tail on the creatures' fowl analog, raising them from birth to adapt for walking in a more dinosaur-like way. As you can see from this video, the chicken was successfully made to walk like a doofus. http://ak.c.ooyala.com/8zeDZrazpotRAgVsS6651Hw0FQSGW12n/Ut_HKthATH4eww8X... Please enable Javascript to watch this video "These results indicate a shift from the standard bird, knee-driven bipedal locomotion to a more hip-driven locomotion, typical of crocodilians (the only other extant archosaur group), mammals, and hypothetically, bipedal non-avian dinosaurs," the researchers write in the study. So although we...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net