14 DAY TRIAL // A study published in today's issue of the journal Evolution details how, in a series of quite bizarre experiments, researchers pulled a Dr. Frankenstein and engineered chickens with dinosaur-like traits.
Thus, this research project saw scientists grow Velociraptor- and Archaeopteryx-like snouts on otherwise perfectly ordinary chicken embryos.
To prove that they really did it, the specialists behind this study released a series of images revealing the rather peculiar anatomy of their laboratory-made dino-chickens. You can find these images below.
The skull on the left is that of a normal chicken embryo that is fully developed and ready to hatch. The skull on the right belongs to a modern alligator.
The central image, on the other hand, shows the skull of one of the hybrid embryos created as part of this study. It's easy to notice that it looks very different to the skull of the normal baby chick.
Instead, this science-modeled skull resembles that of the modern-day alligator in that it ends not with a beak but with a reptilian snout formed from two bones.
So, how did they do it?
In the report detailing their work, the scientists who made the dino-chickens explain that, to put dinosaur-like snouts on baby chicks, they simply toyed with the molecules used by birds to build beaks.
More precisely, they blocked the activity of two proteins that, although present both in reptiles and in birds, display increased levels of activity in the latter.
When the activity of these two proteins was blocked in chicken embryos, the developing creatures failed to form beaks and instead ended up sporting reptilian-like snouts, the researchers explain.
Having imaged the snouts with the help of a computed tomography scanner, the scientists found them to resemble the facial traits of dinosaurs species like Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.
More importantly, why did they do it?
The end goal of this research project wasn't to create the perfect pet for fans of the strange and the macabre, but to shed new light on the evolution of birds.
It's widely accepted that birds evolved from dinosaurs. Still, the scientific community is yet to figure out exactly how and why this happened.
This one study aimed to reveal the molecular process that caused ancient dinosaurs with snouts to become birds with beaks, and succeeded to do just this.
“Little work has been done on what exactly a beak is, anatomically, and how it got that way either evolutionarily or developmentally,” said study author Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar, as cited by Phys Org.
“Our goal here was to understand the molecular underpinnings of an important evolutionary transition, not to create a ‘dino-chicken’ simply for the sake of it,” the scientist went on to explain.
