The domestic chicken

• Order: Chicken birds (Galliformes)

• Subspecies: Domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus)

• Size:
  Depending on the breed, laying hens are, for example, about 60 centimeters long and up to 40 centimeters high (shoulder height). Brahma roosters can even reach a shoulder height of up to 75 centimeters!

• Toes:
  The "common" breeds have 4 toes on each foot (three at the front, one at the back), including the "primal chicken", the bankiva chicken. However, there are also breeds with 5 or 6 toes on each foot.

• Original origin:
  The bankiva chicken, which still lives in the wild today and is native to Southeast Asia, is considered the "original chicken".

• Life expectancy:
  Between 16 months and 10 years, depending on the breed

• Weight:
  Depending on breed and sex between 1.5 and 5 kilograms

Of course, we can only make assumptions about the real hard facts of the dinosaurs based on the fossil finds. Nevertheless, many astonishing insights have been gained from the fossilized ancestors.

Even Henry Huxley, a friend and collaborator of Charles Darwin, suspected, based on the fossil "primitive bird" Archaeopteryx found in 1861, that birds descended from dinosaurs. This thesis was sometimes supported and sometimes rejected over the next hundred years.

Then, in the 1960s, the bird-like dinosaur Deinonychus was discovered in western North America. The skeleton was built particularly lightly, and the long arms were reminiscent of wings. Paleontologist John Ostrom even considered whether this animal might already have had feathers, as the idea that birds descended from dinosaurs began to slowly take hold.

Until then, however, no one could narrow down when feathers might have first appeared, because no remains of the delicate fibers had been found. In 1996, at a conference in New York, came the big moment: Canadian paleontologist Philip Currie had learned of an unusual fossil in China and showed Ostrom a photo of a small fossil whose bones had been buried by fine volcanic ash. The tiny particles had preserved all the fine details of the clearly recognizable feather fringe. This specimen was later named Sinosauropteryx.

From then on, discoveries came thick and fast. More than twenty different species of feathered dinosaurs were unearthed in the Liaoning region, the site of the first fossil, including even a nine-meter-long ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex covered in downy feathers. Now one might say that this proves the descent of birds from dinosaurs. But it is even cooler! Birds not only descend from dinosaurs; according to taxonomic classification, they are living dinosaurs! Within the theropod group, they are most closely related to raptors, including Zhenyuanlong, a feathered dinosaur only discovered in 2014.

Exactly when the first feathers evolved is still not entirely clear. However, what is becoming increasingly certain is that it was not a sudden jump from featherless to feathered, but rather an evolution spanning millions of years. The initial feathers also appear to have served entirely different purposes than flight, functioning more for communication or thermoregulation.

Thus, the feather underwent a very long evolution before it first caught the eye of humans in the jungle settlements of Southeast Asia, displayed in the colorful plumage of a red junglefowl. Another approximately 10,000 years passed since then until the first chickens moved into ST. MARTINS Lodge & thermal baths.

The first chickens? Or the last dinosaurs?