Our four hens are not remotely aggressive. Sure, Hope, one of our Rhode Island Reds, can get a little carried away while pecking food from someone’s hand. (“Ouch!”) And “the girls” do become positively peevish if disturbed while laying.
But they are, at heart, docile creatures. I’m not sure the same could be said for what has been dubbed the Chicken From Hell.
It’s well-established, if hard to believe, that chickens and dinosaurs are related. In fact the chicken is believed to be the closest living relative of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. (Really! You can look it up.) Now comes news that researchers have discovered a toothless dinosaur that had a beak, a head crest and, presumably, feathered legs.
This Chicken From Hell, unveiled by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, University of Utah and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, was 11 feet long and weighed 500 pounds, according to The Washington Post. It belonged to a group of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs.
The birdlike species, which lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, had “murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place,” the newspaper reports. The fossils of three specimens were found in three locations in North and South Dakota.
“It would have been a cross between a chicken and a lizard,” Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told the newspaper.
The Post said this “unsettling beast,” formally known as Anzu wyliei, looks like it could “stomp you, rip you to pieces or simply peck you to death. Chances are, once you have the image of the Chicken From Hell in your head, you will never think of it as anything other than the Chicken From Hell.”
The Anzu wyliei “reminds everyone of the birdiness of dinosaurs, and the dinosaur-ness of birds,” the Post notes. “Paleontologists can become dyspeptic when they hear that dinosaurs are extinct. Not so: Birds are dinosaurs.”
Okay, so I’m willing to suspend disbelief long enough to concede that our Hope, Nellie, Snow and Nala may well be evolved, miniaturized, domesticated versions of dinosaurs. But be that as it may, if I run into a living, breathing Anzu wyliei, I sure as hell won’t try to hand-feed it.
It’s well-established, if hard to believe, that chickens and dinosaurs are related. In fact the chicken is believed to be the closest living relative of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. (Really! You can look it up.) Now comes news that researchers have discovered a toothless dinosaur that had a beak, a head crest and, presumably, feathered legs.
This Chicken From Hell, unveiled by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, University of Utah and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, was 11 feet long and weighed 500 pounds, according to The Washington Post. It belonged to a group of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs.
The birdlike species, which lived at the end of the Cretaceous period, had “murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place,” the newspaper reports. The fossils of three specimens were found in three locations in North and South Dakota.
“It would have been a cross between a chicken and a lizard,” Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told the newspaper.
The Post said this “unsettling beast,” formally known as Anzu wyliei, looks like it could “stomp you, rip you to pieces or simply peck you to death. Chances are, once you have the image of the Chicken From Hell in your head, you will never think of it as anything other than the Chicken From Hell.”
The Anzu wyliei “reminds everyone of the birdiness of dinosaurs, and the dinosaur-ness of birds,” the Post notes. “Paleontologists can become dyspeptic when they hear that dinosaurs are extinct. Not so: Birds are dinosaurs.”
Okay, so I’m willing to suspend disbelief long enough to concede that our Hope, Nellie, Snow and Nala may well be evolved, miniaturized, domesticated versions of dinosaurs. But be that as it may, if I run into a living, breathing Anzu wyliei, I sure as hell won’t try to hand-feed it.
 |
| Artist's rendition of the Chicken From Hell |
No comments:
Post a Comment