It’s been a year since the world caught on fire. Your flock is much smaller than a year ago, but at least some of you are still here. The same can’t be said for the giants, the finger flyers and the great sea beasts, all gone. You still sometimes feed on the carcasses, but after a year, there’s not much left. You eat seed, bugs; whatever you can find. In this kind of world, its not smart to be a picky eater. You know this because you’ve eaten a lot of their carcasses too.
Besides the bright spot behind the clouds, there’s not much to tell day from night. Has the bright spot started to look a little brighter? Hard to say; your time is taken up looking for food, watching out for whatever’s out there that might eat you and, most importantly, keeping those eggs warm. If you could express gratitude, it would be for the fact that your chicks can get up and move around with you mere hours after hatching. They can even seek out their own food, giving them a real advantage over others of your extended family who have to be fed as hatchlings.
You’ll want to to take good care of those eggs, little mother dinosaur. The world has been forever changed and there are a lot of jobs that need to be filled. It’ll take time, but from you and yours will arise beautiful pheasants, majestic turkeys and the whole reason we’re here, chickens.
There wasn’t much left over after that meteor smacked into our world, about 66 million years ago. All the big dinosaurs died out because they just couldn’t find enough to eat, if they weren’t killed outright. It wasn’t the strong that survived, it was the little ones who took what they could get. Watching chickens as they eagerly scramble for a tasty morsel on the ground or as they do the hop, skip and jump trying to bring down a bug on the wing, you can imagine that time.
Modern birds (Neornithes) had evolved quite a bit before the end of the age of the dinosaurs, having long ago lost their teeth and long tails. Some ancient fossils reveal birds that would not look at all out of place in our world. Four different clades (a group of living things descended from a common ancestor) of birds survived the meteor. Today, they are grouped as paleognaths (ostriches, emus, cassowaries and their relatives) and neognaths (all the other kinds of birds).
The paleognaths are one of the four clades. “Paleo” means old and “gnath” refers to the jaw structure. The palates (roof of the mouth) of paleognaths more closely resemble those of alligators and crocodiles than the more birdlike palates of the neognaths. Most recognizable paleognaths are large flightless birds, but there are birds called the tinamous, which do fly. Scientists are debating whether or not the common name for the flightless birds, the ratites, are an actual clade or the result of flight lessness evolving independently several times. The fossil record is pretty sketchy before the meteor and only reliable after it.
There are three clades that survived representing the neognaths (new jaws). We have a better fossil record and, while there is a small amount of debate, it looks like they were already separate before the meteor. The clade with 95% of all the 10,000 species of birds is the neoaves. Pigeons, eagles, penguins, sparrows hummingbirds, parrots and blue jays are all neoaves, just to give some idea of the incredible diversity of this clade. Genetic evidence suggests this happened beforehand, but the fossil evidence shows that after the meteor hit, the neoaves were able to evolve into species suited to many, many different niches.
The last two clades share several similarities and seem to have diverged from a possible common ancestor. Today we know them as the Galloanserae, aka, the fowl.
The waterfowl (Anseriformes) include swans, geese and ducks. The fossil record shows pretty clearly that this clade existed prior to the meteor. Even more so than our final clade. Like our final clade, they have a number of characteristics that make them candidates for living with and being cared for by humans. Their babies can feed themselves relatively quickly after hatching and they either lay a lot of eggs/are good to eat or look really pretty or any combination of the above.
Which brings us to the final clade, the Galliformes, aka (for the domesticated ones at least), the fowl: turkeys, pheasants, chickens and their allies. These are heavy bodied, ground feeding birds found everywhere in the world except Antarctica. There are 290 different kinds, but the one we’ve come to know and love is the chicken.
Is it that surprising that the ancestor to the chicken survived when their ferocious ancestor, the T-rex did not? Their major advantages would have been their size (small), their ability to not only hunt, but to eat anything they came across while hunting. Since they ate on the ground, they didn’t have to live in trees, which came in handy due to the fact that all the world’s forests at the time of the meteor strike were either knocked down, burned or blasted completely out of existence. That’s a survivor right there. Chickens weren’t domesticated as egg layers or meat birds, they were fighting birds.
These are ferocious survivors who may love us when we’re cuddling them, but would cheerfully eat us if we collapsed in their pen. Hey, food is food, amiright?
In a way the relationship hasn’t changed all that much: 66 million years ago, that little dinosaur survivor was probably worried about that little furry bugger who kept trying to steal her egg. Sixty Six million years later, the descendants of that little furry guy have gotten bigger and are still stealing eggs.
Besides the bright spot behind the clouds, there’s not much to tell day from night. Has the bright spot started to look a little brighter? Hard to say; your time is taken up looking for food, watching out for whatever’s out there that might eat you and, most importantly, keeping those eggs warm. If you could express gratitude, it would be for the fact that your chicks can get up and move around with you mere hours after hatching. They can even seek out their own food, giving them a real advantage over others of your extended family who have to be fed as hatchlings.
You’ll want to to take good care of those eggs, little mother dinosaur. The world has been forever changed and there are a lot of jobs that need to be filled. It’ll take time, but from you and yours will arise beautiful pheasants, majestic turkeys and the whole reason we’re here, chickens.
There wasn’t much left over after that meteor smacked into our world, about 66 million years ago. All the big dinosaurs died out because they just couldn’t find enough to eat, if they weren’t killed outright. It wasn’t the strong that survived, it was the little ones who took what they could get. Watching chickens as they eagerly scramble for a tasty morsel on the ground or as they do the hop, skip and jump trying to bring down a bug on the wing, you can imagine that time.
Modern birds (Neornithes) had evolved quite a bit before the end of the age of the dinosaurs, having long ago lost their teeth and long tails. Some ancient fossils reveal birds that would not look at all out of place in our world. Four different clades (a group of living things descended from a common ancestor) of birds survived the meteor. Today, they are grouped as paleognaths (ostriches, emus, cassowaries and their relatives) and neognaths (all the other kinds of birds).
The paleognaths are one of the four clades. “Paleo” means old and “gnath” refers to the jaw structure. The palates (roof of the mouth) of paleognaths more closely resemble those of alligators and crocodiles than the more birdlike palates of the neognaths. Most recognizable paleognaths are large flightless birds, but there are birds called the tinamous, which do fly. Scientists are debating whether or not the common name for the flightless birds, the ratites, are an actual clade or the result of flight lessness evolving independently several times. The fossil record is pretty sketchy before the meteor and only reliable after it.
There are three clades that survived representing the neognaths (new jaws). We have a better fossil record and, while there is a small amount of debate, it looks like they were already separate before the meteor. The clade with 95% of all the 10,000 species of birds is the neoaves. Pigeons, eagles, penguins, sparrows hummingbirds, parrots and blue jays are all neoaves, just to give some idea of the incredible diversity of this clade. Genetic evidence suggests this happened beforehand, but the fossil evidence shows that after the meteor hit, the neoaves were able to evolve into species suited to many, many different niches.
The last two clades share several similarities and seem to have diverged from a possible common ancestor. Today we know them as the Galloanserae, aka, the fowl.
The waterfowl (Anseriformes) include swans, geese and ducks. The fossil record shows pretty clearly that this clade existed prior to the meteor. Even more so than our final clade. Like our final clade, they have a number of characteristics that make them candidates for living with and being cared for by humans. Their babies can feed themselves relatively quickly after hatching and they either lay a lot of eggs/are good to eat or look really pretty or any combination of the above.
Which brings us to the final clade, the Galliformes, aka (for the domesticated ones at least), the fowl: turkeys, pheasants, chickens and their allies. These are heavy bodied, ground feeding birds found everywhere in the world except Antarctica. There are 290 different kinds, but the one we’ve come to know and love is the chicken.
Is it that surprising that the ancestor to the chicken survived when their ferocious ancestor, the T-rex did not? Their major advantages would have been their size (small), their ability to not only hunt, but to eat anything they came across while hunting. Since they ate on the ground, they didn’t have to live in trees, which came in handy due to the fact that all the world’s forests at the time of the meteor strike were either knocked down, burned or blasted completely out of existence. That’s a survivor right there. Chickens weren’t domesticated as egg layers or meat birds, they were fighting birds.
These are ferocious survivors who may love us when we’re cuddling them, but would cheerfully eat us if we collapsed in their pen. Hey, food is food, amiright?
In a way the relationship hasn’t changed all that much: 66 million years ago, that little dinosaur survivor was probably worried about that little furry bugger who kept trying to steal her egg. Sixty Six million years later, the descendants of that little furry guy have gotten bigger and are still stealing eggs.