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Are We Not Dinosaurs? A: We Are Chicken! A STORY OF DARWIN, EVO-DEVO, AND THE OUROBOROS OF AVIAN GENEALOGY

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Cristina Daura

Feb. 1, 2017

As anyone who got their dino-science from Dr. Alan Grant knows, before there were chickens (or chicken eggs), there were dinosaurs. And no bird is more closely related—on a genetic level—to the attractions at Jurassic Park than Gallus gallus domesticus, or chickens (and, fine, turkeys, too). Of the roughly 10,000+ modern spe- cies of birds, the chicken is by far the most populous and husbanded. At any given point, there are about 20 billion chickens on the planet, and these birds have undergone the fewest genomic changes overall of any bird species, reflecting slower evolution from dinosaurs and, cumulatively, less evolution overall. So how did we get from T-Rexes to the beady-eyed, massive-breasted, egg-pumping creatures of today?

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