Evolution News

Bird As Big As Tyrannosaur Rex Discovered In China

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Xu Xing is a Chinese paleontologist who finds the most interesting things! This week's unveiling is the head and some bones from what is easily the biggest bird in all time---as big as a Tyrannosaur Rex! So I just had to draw my version of this bird. I assume it turned its head red when angry just like my turkeys like to do....

From USA Today:

The dinosaur world's latest star had a toothless beak, waved feathered arms incapable of flight and may have hunted only plants. But if you met Gigantoraptor erlianensis in a Mongolian forest 70 million years ago, best to have given it a wide berth. At more than 16 feet tall and roughly 3,000 pounds, the beast could stand eyeball-to-eyeball with a tyrannosaur, Chinese researchers say.
The bones of what its discoverers call the world's largest birdlike dinosaur were revealed Wednesday in Beijing. The announcement came two years after the remains were dug from a mud hill near the Inner Mongolian city of Erlian.

Most theories suggest carnivorous dinosaurs shrank as they grew more birdlike. This latest find is about 35 times heavier than other similar feathered dinosaurs, called oviraptors, which rarely exceeded a body mass of 88 pounds.

"This could be the largest ever species to have feathers," says Xu Xing, the lead scientist behind the discovery, reported in the journal Nature.

After the death and destruction of the whole world of dinosaurs, when creatures recolonized the planet, the biggest of them all for a while were the 'terror birds' which ran around North America for a while. There is one of these guys in the Natural History Museum in Boston. It is taller than a human but it is dwarfed by this critter! The interesting thing here is, why do all animals end up giants?

And in this case, a giant which was walking about the place at the same time as other giants and it has no teeth! The others had huge teeth. How did it survive? Was its econiche hostile to these other predators? If it was feathered, was the climate too cold for the other giants who prefered warmer climes? Or was it too dry and prone to sudden floods? In general, huge birds like this such as the moa or ostrich live in dry climates which have colder nights.

So, was central China a savanna? This wonderful discovery opens many doors to rooms we can't even imagine. The simple straight-line evolutionary trees we learn are actually very thorny bushes with many side branches and individual leaves. All I know is, we barely have found maybe about 1% of the variety and continuity of the creatures who populated this planet over the last 300 million years!

Here is a great web page for a course in Avian evolution by Prof. Richisong:

Avian genomes are small and streamlined compared with those of other amniotes by virtue of having fewer repetitive elements and less non-coding DNA (a typical bird genome consists of about 1.45 billion base pairs; human genomes are another billion base pairs longer). This condition has been suggested to represent a key adaptation for flight in birds, by reducing the metabolic costs associated with having large genome and cell sizes.

However, the evolution of genome architecture in birds, or any other lineage, is difficult to study because genomic information is often absent for long-extinct relatives. Organ et al. (2007) found that bone-cell size correlates well with genome size in extant vertebrates, and used that relationship to estimate the genome sizes of 31 species of extinct dinosaur, including several species of extinct birds.

Their results indicate that the small genomes typically associated with avian flight evolved in the saurischian dinosaur lineage between 230 and 250 million years ago, long before this lineage gave rise to the first birds.

By comparison, ornithischian dinosaurs were inferred to have had much larger genomes, probably typical of ancestral Dinosauria. Using comparative genomic data, Organ et al. (2007) estimated that genome-wide interspersed mobile elements, a class of repetitive DNA, comprised 5–12% of the total genome size in the saurischian dinosaur lineage, but was 7–19% of total genome size in ornithischian dinosaurs, suggesting that repetitive elements became less active in the saurischian lineage.

These genomic characteristics should be added to the list of attributes previously considered avian, but now thought to have arisen in non-avian dinosaurs, such as feathers, pulmonary innovations, and parental care and nesting.

If this is so and the new discovery is a bird-like creature living 70 million years ago, then birds took to the air and then some evolved back to ground-only life and there is enough evolutionary time between in this history, over 100 million years. We know that animals evolve various things and then lose them again depending on what is needed for survival and the rearing of young.

This latest find fills us with wonder. Did the bone structure look like dinosaurs or birds? How dense were they? And did the creature have a wishbone? I do know that many birds with no teeth are quite capable of ripping up other animals. My turkeys used to tear apart mice and snakes, for example. And of course, the raptor birds can rip apart small animals and vultures tear up the carcasses of humans and elephants! I bet this latest creature that was discovered this week probably dined on carcasses. With all the giant dinosaurs roaming the planet, I'm sure there was plenty to eat.

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South American Araucana Chickens Came Over Before Europeans

Elaine Meinel Supkis

I have these Chilean chickens who lay blue eggs. Now we have genetic proof the native chickens of Peru which are the only ones to lay eggs that aren't white or brown, are unique in many ways! I love these Araucanas chickens because they are very friendly and easy to handle. Many of my hens will squat down for me to pick them up. I wonder about their genetic history now that we know that chickens came over to South America from across the Pacific rather than from Europe.

From the Independent:

A chicken bone has provided anthropologists with the strongest evidence yet to suggest that Polynesians sailed to South America before the discovery of the New World by Europeans.

The possibility that Polynesians had direct contact with the indigenous people of South America has long intrigued experts on ancient human migrations, but hard evidence has been difficult to come by. However, a study by scientists from New Zealand and Chile has now shown that chickens may have been introduced into South America by Polynesians sailing from the west rather than Europeans coming from the east.

Chicken bones excavated from an archaeological site in central Chile have been analysed by carbon dating and by DNA profiling. One of the bones was dated to more than 100 years before the first Europeans arrived in South America and its DNA shows a strong correlation with the DNA of present-day chickens living on the inhabited islands of the Pacific Ocean.

I suspect many of the natives of California and Baja also came across the Pacific Ocean via boats. After all, these superb navigators and sailors colonized every possible island in the Pacific! If they could reach Hawaii and Easter Island then they could also reach North and South America. A recent story about the possibility that a major comet blast over North America killed off much of the larger animals as well as most of the humans hunting them shows clearly that we still know virtually nothing about the long process of colonization of the New World.

When I saw the news about these ancient chicken bones I sat up and exclaimed, 'That explains everything about my chickens!' Namely, they are the sweetest of all chicken breeds. They never peck at any humans, they are extremely tame and allow me to pick them up off the ground when they are running free, for example. Their eggs are totally different from other domestic chickens which means they probably are a mutation that was genetically isolated for a long time.

From Murray McMurry Hatchery:

The "Easter Egg Chicken", This unusual breed gets its name from the Indian tribe of Chile where they were first discovered. Araucanas lay beautiful colored eggs of blue-green shades from turquoise to deep olive. These natural Easter Eggs will amaze your friends and make a great "show and tell" project for school. Adults are of medium size with pea combs and our breeding stock is selected for their ability to produce colored eggs. They exhibit a wonderful combination of colors and color patterns and 10 or 20 of these birds make an absolutely beautiful laying flock that is extremely hardy and will be the talk of the town.

If you click on the McMurray web page, do read the comments of happy hen owners. They all exclaim how friendly these chickens are. Rhode Island Reds, for example, have nasty tempers and will attack anyone collecting their eggs so you have to bribe them to leave the nest or be fast with the egg removal process. But with the Araucanas, even a small child can reach right under the hen who will even move over to make it easier, collecting their marvelous blue and green eggs.

I used to have Jungle Fowls from Asia which were throwbacks to 5,000 years ago and they look very much like these Chilean chickens. The golden/brown/buff feathers, tuffs of feathers on the cheeks and small combs are very similar. The chicks look like fluffy, tiny chipmunks with their stripes and fat little cheeks.

The news that these marvelous, singular birds, came over on canoes all the way over from Sumatra to South America makes me wonder: did this vast journey in tiny boats shape the genes of these birds? Namely, did the unfriendly ones or uncooperative ones die or were eaten? So only the most serene, friendly birds survived?

I once had a fire in the incubator of a hatching of Araucanas and only one chick survived. I put her in my pocket and carried her around while I took care of things. As this hen grew up, she had a lopsided hunched back due to injuries from that fire. So I kept her with me, she being rather helpless.

Well, she was super-friendly as her breed always is! And she rode on my shoulder even when I was driving the truck around the property. I would take her to schools to meet children who she let pet her and play with her. When Mo Udall was running for President many years ago, he had her ride on his shoulder when giving a speech in Tucson.

I had a long fight with the city over tearing down my house and gardens and paving them over for a parking lot. At one point, an officer tried to ticket me, claiming my Araucanas were 'noisy.' Trucks were roaring by and military jets were screaming overhead. I said, 'See you in court'. And we recorded the noises and took this to court. Along with Hunchback Hen. Who sat in on the proceedings.

She won her case, of course.

These chickens obviously evolved in such a fashion, due to their long journey across the world's mightiest ocean, that they make ideal pets and a source of good, healthy, colorful eggs. They are good in cities as well as in the country and are my favorite breed of chicken. And I must thank the Polynesians who created this sweet bird.

Thank you!

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