Scientists grow chickens with dinosaur legs as they aim to prove how evolution works

Sounding like the start of a Jurassic Park scenario, scientists once grew chickens with 'dinosaur-like' legs in an aim to prove how evolution works.

Thankfully, it's been a good seven years since then and our planet hasn't been overtaken by jurassic chicken hybrids... yet.

Joking aside, the study itself is unsurprisingly a lot more complex than copying and pasting t-rex legs onto a bird.

Before we get into it, let's first explain a misconception about the asteroid that supposedly wiped out the dinosaur population 66 million years ago.

Although many were killed in the aftermath, small, bird-like maniraptorans survived.

Keith Corrigan/Alamy Stock Photo

In a 2014 study published in PLOS Biology, researchers suggested that their small size and therefore limited food requirements allowed them to keep going.

What's more, flying and movement required less energy as they didn't have as much weight to carry around.

Thanks to their survival, the evolutionary process led to the feathered sky-dwellers we know today.

To try and find out more about this process, scientists in Chile essentially grew an ancient bird leg structure onto chicken embryos.

As demonstrated in the team's study, published in the science journal Evolution, they did so by modifying the genes of regular chickens so they would develop 'a dinosaur-like fibula' on their lower legs.

You see, ancient bird-like dinosaurs such as the archaeopteryx had a tubular shaped bone called the fibula that grew all the way down to the ankle, and another bone in the leg beside it called the tibia reached a similar length.

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But as evolution worked its magic, more recent avian dinosaurs featured a fibula that was much shorter than the tibia and more splinter-like at the end.

As for the birds we have today, although their embryos initially show signs of developing long fibulas, as they grow these bones become shorter and thinner.

The University of Chile researchers, led by João Francisco Botelho, set out to find out why this evolutionary process occurred.

As explained by former Discover editor Nathaniel Scharping, they did this by inhibiting the expression of the unusually named Indian Hedgehog (IHH) gene, which meant the chicken embryos' fibulas continued to grow.

"They believe it has something to do with a bone in the ankle called the calcaneum, which normally connects to the fibula," he said.

"When the IHH gene was suppressed, the calcaneum began to produce the parathyroid-related protein (PthrP) gene, responsible for promoting bone growth.

"With the gene modification, the chickens' fibulas kept growing throughout their development, as opposed to stopping halfway."

Although they certainly achieved some fascinating results, the chicken embryos were never intended to make it to the hatching stage.

So no, we won't be getting dinosaur chicken eggs for breakfast anytime soon.