WALKING LIKE A DINOSAUR
How do you figure out how dinosaurs walked? For a group of researchers at the University of Chile and the University of Illinois, the answer came from artificially changing the anatomy of a distant living cousin: the chicken. Birds are the descendants of giant bipedal dinosaurs called theropods that roamed Earth millions of years ago. Some of the closest living avian relatives to the T. rex are chickens. But the two don’t have quite the same anatomy, such as a chicken’s lack of a heavy tail. It was thought that moving a living bird’s centre of mass would recreate the posture of extinct dinosaurs, so a plunger-like tail was added to chicken test subjects to redistribute their centre of mass in a similar way to the T. rex.
In this study, researchers raised 12 domestic chicks for 12 weeks, split into three groups of four. One group of chickens was left alone as the control group, the second was given a weight to carry around on their backs and the third group was fitted with an experimental tail that weighed around 15 per cent of the chicken’s overall mass. Over the 12-week period, the tail-wearing chickens had a more posteriorly located centre of mass than the other chickens, along with a more vertically orientated femur and elongated gait. The new chicken strut resembled that of a velociraptor walking through Jurassic Park.
RECREATING THE DINOSAUR WALK
How a chicken’s body
