This is an experiment from 2008! Researchers fitted a chicken with a prosthetic tail. As a result, the chicken's center of gravity changed and it looked like an imaginary Tyrannosaurus rex! Many people have misunderstandings about chickens and Tyrannosaurus rex, thinking that chickens evolved from Tyrannosaurus rex.
This is wrong. Chickens are definitely not descendants of Tyrannosaurus rex, nor are they the closest modern relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex.
In fact, chickens are dinosaurs just like other birds.
The dinosaur family tree is very large, and birds are part of a large branch of dinosaurs called theropods.
The common features of this type of dinosaur are hollow bones and three toes on each limb.
Theropod dinosaurs also have various evolutionary branches, one of which is coelurosaurs, to which Tyrannosaurus rex and birds belong, and the common feature of these dinosaurs is that they have feathers.
Tyrannosaurus rex is a clade of the coelurosaurian subclade Tyrannosaurus, and birds are a clade of the subclade Maniraptorosaurus.
Tyrannosaurus rex came very late in the dinosaur evolution game, appearing about 66 million to 72 million years ago, while their ancestors diverged from bird ancestors about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period.
△A rough simplified diagram of the relationship between chicken and Tyrannosaurus rex
Therefore, Tyrannosaurus rex is not the ancestor of chickens, and the genetic relationship between them is even much greater than that between humans and mice.
In addition, there is no single bird that is the closest modern relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, because all birds are similar to Tyrannosaurus rex.
The reason why chickens are generally believed to be the descendants of Tyrannosaurus rex on the Internet today, I think, is because when scientists want to understand dinosaurs and try to find some answers in modern birds, they will compare chickens, just like attaching a fake tail to a chicken to simulate the walking of Tyrannosaurus rex. After all, what kind of bird is easier to obtain than chicken?
On the other hand, many popular science bloggers have been deepening this misunderstanding in order to attract attention. After all, how can comparing chickens and Tyrannosaurus rex be more conflicting?
at last
About 65 million years ago, an asteroid struck the Earth, or there were other reasons. In short, the Earth's climate changed dramatically, wiping out three-quarters of the plant and animal species on the Earth.
In fact, during this mass extinction, any land animal weighing more than 25 kilograms disappeared. Tyrannosaurus rex and all other non-avian dinosaurs became extinct, ending the reign of the dinosaurs.
Of course, many birds also became extinct, but the few birds and other animals that survived spread across the world and evolved into the species we see today.