T-Rex a Chicken?

Some scientists now believe the foracious looking monster known as Tyrannosaurus rex was really, genetically speaking, nothing more than a big bawk, bawk, bawk — Chicken.

In a recent report from LiveScience, written by Jeanna Bryner, T. rex’s protein evidence acquired from soft tissue in the prehistoric animal’s leg bone now confirms that the gigantic and scary looking T. rex belongs to the same family-line of chickens and the ostrich.

This new evidence lends further credence to the growing idea that today’s living birds are the ancient, prehistoric dinosaur’s closets relatives and that many were not lost to some mysterious disappearance of the past 60 million years ago, but simply evolved into modern day avians.

“We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds — ostrich and chicken — better than any other organism that we studied,” said researcher John Asara of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School. “We also show that it groups better with birds than [with] modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards.”

Until this new genetic evidence surfaced scientists have long suspected that many in the dinosaur world were most closely related to modern-day birds. However, up until this time, the idea rested largely on similarities between the outward appearances of bird and dinosaur skeletons and not on scientifically proveable data. Now all that has changed.

This new genetic evidence came from a prehistoric femur bone found in 2003 by Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in the Hell Creek Formation. It dates to about 68 million years ago and comes from a “teenage T. rex” with some of its soft tissue still in good order and useful for testing of its genetically-linked protein structure. Though no genetic material was preserved, researchers were able to extract the proteins from the collagen tissues. By comparing the T. rex’s protein sequences with those of 21 living organisms, a team of researchers say they have locked in the dinosaur-bird link. In the case of T. rex’s collagen, “it was responsible for making hard bone so that the dinosaur could stand.”

“The proteins are what carry out the function inside the cells and organs. So the protein does a lot of the work. That [protein] sequence was derived from DNA,” Asara told LiveScience.