DID YOU KNOW: The genes of a chicken can be manipulated to lengthen its legs to dinosaur-like proportions.

You probably didn’t because it was just announced by researchers. However, the dino-chicks failed to hatch so don’t worry, we’re not entering Jurassic Park anytime soon:

These studies are not aimed at producing dinosaurs for commercial or non-scientific purposes, as in the ‘Jurassic Park’ series.

The purpose of this cross-species experiment was to demonstrate how evolution might work in the long-term saying that “because of the evolutionary relationship between chickens and dinosaurs, the oddly shod chick has experienced “reverse evolution””.

By inhibiting early maturation of a leg of the chicken embryo, the leg reverts to the shape that dinosaurs’ legs had.

This supports the theory that birds evolved from theropods, a small type of dinosaur, during the Jurassic period 145 million years ago. Cute, hey?

Fossil evidence supports the evolution of a fibula that was splinter-like, but almost as long as the tibia, before convergent evolution in different lineages of a strongly reduced fibula.

Basically, all chickens have a fibula. The only difference is that in adults it is shorter than the bird’s tibia while in dinosaurs the tube-shaped fibula reached from the top of the leg to the ankle. In its early stages of embryonic development, a chick’s fibula might more closely resemble that of a dinosaur than its actual parent and they just wondered if it would be able to maintain that shape.

Researchers found that the development of the chicken’s short fibula was being stopped in its usual growth patterns by an identifiable gene, colourfully named the Indian Hedgehog gene, science writer BEC Crew reports for Science Alert. When they halted the work of this gene, researchers saw a chicken embryo with longer, spiny legs that resembled those of a dinosaur.

Imagine that, tiny dinosaur chickens.

[source: csmonitor]