the authors wrote. false tails

Walk Like A Dinosaur: Scientists Put Fake Tails On Chickens To Study How T. Rex Mightve Moved [VIDEO]

To figure out how dinosaurs walked, you could build an elaborate computer model or you could attach a ke tail to a chickens butt.

Scientists from the University of Chile, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago opted for the latter approach in their research, as you can see here:

Modern birds descend from a group of dinosaurs called theropods, a vast suborder that includes both the 40-foot long, 7-ton Tyrannosaurus rex and the diminuitive Anchiornis huxleyi,false tails which was little more than a foot long and weighed in at just under 4 ounces. It might be possible to glean some knowledge about the way theropod dinosaurs moved by closely studying their descendants. But,false tails while chickens and dinosaurs have similar feet and feathers, theres one key component missing in poultry -- the long, heavy tail.

So Chilean researcher Bruno Gossi and colleagues decided to ke it.

In the teams experiments, four experimental chickens were raised from birth wearing an artificial tail made from a wooden stick, attached to the chickens behind with modeling clay. The researchers replaced the tail every few days as the chicken grew, keeping the tail at 15 percent of the birds weight -- a proportion they think is probably similar to the weight of a theropod dinosaurs tail. They shared their observations on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE.

They found that the chickens raised with the tails walked differently and stood with a slightly altered posture than the control birds. The prosthetic-tailed chickens stood with their femurs (the big uppermost leg bones) held in a more vertically-oriented position, and moved their femurs and knees differently while walking:

These results indicate a shift from the standard bird, knee-driven bipedal locomotion to a more hip-driven locomotion, typical of crocodilians mammals, and hypothetically, bipedal non-avian dinosaurs,Wraped horse hair tai, the authors wrote.

To ensure that it wasnt just extra weight of the tail causing the changes, the researchers also had another control group of chickens raised wearing coats with lead weights held close to the chickens center of mass. When they crunched the numbers, the control-weight groups posture and walking gait were pretty close to the control chickens that were raised without any lead coats or tails.

Our experimental approach, although not perfect, was effective in displacing the [chickens center of mass] and recreating locomotor patterns expected in non-avian theropods, the authors wrote. Thus, we expect that careful phenotypic manipulation of extant birds can open new avenues of experimental investigation into unexplored cets of dinosaur locomotor mechanics and energetics, providing a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between form and function in dinosaur evolution.

SOURCE: Grossi et al. Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion. PLOS ONE, published online 5 February 2014.

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