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Chickens with Velociraptor-like snouts: It just happened
Shayne Jacopian for redOrbit.com – @ShayneJacopian
This is just…strange.
Scientists at Yale apparently created chicken embryos with Velociraptor-like snouts in place of beaks, according to a statement they released yesterday.
While it would have been really odd/interesting to see these things walking around, the embryos (somewhat thankfully) didn’t survive to hatch.
“They actually probably wouldn’t have done that badly if they did hatch,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, the lead author of the study and a paleontologist and developmental biologist at Yale University. “Mostly, though, we were interested in the evolution of the beak, and not in hatching a dino-chicken just for the sake of it.”
Thank you!
Why they did it
Indeed, studying these developing embryos gave the scientists a better understanding of how birds’ beaks evolved from the snouts of their distant dinosaur ancestors.
“The beak is a crucial part of the avian feeding apparatus, and is the component of the avian skeleton that has perhaps diversified most extensively and most radically—consider flamingos, parrots, hawks, pelicans and hummingbirds, among others,” Bhullar told LiveScience. “Yet little work has been done on what exactly a beak is, anatomically, and how it got that way either evolutionarily or developmentally.”
This figure shows the experimental restoration of predicted ancestral expression, with skulls from a chicken (left), experimental animal (middle), and alligator (right). (Credit: Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar)
Controlling only two genes determining the development of the middle of the face by suppressing the activity of the proteins those genes produced, the scientists were able to drastically change the anatomy of the tested chicken embryos, demonstrating how small genetic mutations could cause abrupt changes in the fossil record.
This research analyzing the evolution of the beak could also lend itself to the study of other evolutionary transformations in the future, such as the origin of mammals from their reptilian ancestors.
And that’s cool and all, but above all else, we’re just thankful that this piece of work didn’t have to become a reality in order for this information to be found.
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113389894/chickens-with-dinosaur-like-snouts-it-just-happened-051315/
