Jurassic World Starts With Chicken Legs
We have to change the way we think about the extinction of dinosaurs, as it seems that not all disappeared, but some turned to the birds we know today. Chilean researchers have been working on chickens, and the legs have been seen to be similar to those on avian dinosaurs.
We have to change the way we think about the extinction of dinosaurs, as it seems that not all disappeared, but some turned to the birds we know today. Chilean researchers have been working on chickens, and the legs have been seen to be similar to those on avian dinosaurs. University of Chile researcher Joao Botelho has been investigating the changes.
The gene IHH – Indian Hedgehog – was inhibited and strange results were found. The fibulae of modern day chickens are prevented from growing as they used to. The bones no longer meet the ankle in the way they did with dinosaurs.
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The results have been published in a journal called Evolution, and the changes are attributed to the maturation of a one bone thanks to a bone in the ankle called the calcaneum. Once IHH has been regulated down, it seems that the fibula and tibia will grow to be the same length, and although the fibula grows longer than it does in controls, the tibia is not as long and tends to be bent.
There was never an intention of allowing the so-called dino-chickens to hatch as there was no record of what may have become of them. The aim of the research was to discover why the legs changed – mainly why they no longer grew in the way that they did when they were dinosaurs.
Alexander Vargas explained that there is now a great deal known about bird development, but also how the transition of the past took place.
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Daniel Okafor
Daniel Okafor is the Senior AI Reporter at TrendinTech, where he covers large language models, machine learning research and the practical use of artificial intelligence across business and government. He previously reported on artificial intelligence for MIT Technology Review, covering the labs behind the current generation of frontier models and the policy debates in Washington and Brussels. Daniel holds a Master of Science in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University and follows the research community closely, attending NeurIPS and ICML each year to speak with the people behind the papers. He has a particular interest in evaluation: how models are benchmarked, where those benchmarks fail and what that means for the companies betting on them.
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