CURRENT DISCOVERY

The domestic chicken

• Order: Chicken birds (Galliformes)

• Subspecies: Domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus)

• Size:
  Depending on the breed, laying hens, for example, are around 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:
  Between 1.5 and 5 kilograms, depending on breed and sex

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.

Henry Huxley, a friend and colleague of Charles Darwin, already suspected that birds were descended from dinosaurs, based on the fossil "prehistoric bird" Archaeopteryx found in 1861. Over the next hundred years, this theory was sometimes supported, sometimes rejected.

Then, in the 1960s, the bird-like dinosaur Deinonychus was discovered in western North America. The skeleton was particularly lightly built and the long arms resembled wings. The palaeontologist John Ostrom even wondered whether this animal had already worn feathers, as the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs was slowly gaining ground.

Until now, however, no one had been able to pinpoint when feathers first appeared, as no remains of the filigree fibers had ever been found. In 1996, at a specialist conference in New York, the big moment came: the Canadian palaeontologist Philip Currie had learned of an extraordinary 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, the finds came thick and fast: more than twenty different species of feathered dinosaurs were unearthed in the Liaoning region, where the first fossil was found, including a nine-metre-long ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex covered in feathers. Now you could say that this proves the descent of birds from dinosaurs. But it's even cooler than that! Birds are not only descended from dinosaurs, they are living dinosaurs according to taxonomic classification! They are most closely related to raptors within the theropod group, including Zhenyuanlong, a feathered dinosaur found as recently as 2014.

It is still not entirely clear when exactly the first feathers emerged. What we can say with increasing certainty, however, is that it was not a sudden leap between featherless and feather-covered, but a development that lasted millions of years. The first feathers also seem to have served completely different purposes than flying, rather they were a means of communication or served to regulate heat.

So it was a very long development of the feather before it first caught the eye of the people of the jungle settlements of South-East Asia in the colorful dress of a bankivahuhn. Since then, another 10,000 years or so have passed before the first chickens moved into the St. Martins thermal baths & Lodge.

The first chickens? Or the last dinosaurs?