The Christian Science Monitor

The chicken age: Will finger lickin’ fossils define our geological era?

Chickens are raised at a California poultry farm. Because of intensive breeding programs and high-tech rearing, the average contemporary chicken is five times as heavy as its predecessor in 1961.

Most people, when they take a broiler chicken from their supermarket shelf, don’t give much thought to what kind of a fossil the bird’s bones will one day make.

But Jan Zalasiewicz does. And he is part of a group of British scientists who believe those fossilized bones will provide future paleontologists with a key hallmark of our society as mankind moves into a

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