chicken embryos with dinosaur snouts created in science lab

[Blake]

"......... Fossil discoveries have recently yielded great insights into*how birds evolved*from their reptilian ancestors, such as how feathers and flight emerged. Another key structure that sets birds apart from their dinosaurs ancestors is their beaks. Researchers suspect that beaks evolved to act like tweezers to give birds a kind of precision grip. The beaks help make up for the dinosaurs' grasping arms, which evolved into wings, giving them the ability to peck at food such as seeds and bugs.

"The beak is a crucial part of the avian feeding apparatus, and is the component of the avian skeleton that has perhaps diversified most extensively and most radically — consider flamingos, parrots, hawks, pelicans and hummingbirds, among others," Bhullar said in a statement. "Yet little work has been done on what exactly a beak is, anatomically, and how it got that way either evolutionarily or developmentally."

To learn more about how the beak evolved, a research team led by Bhullar and developmental biologist Arkhat Abzhanov at Harvard University have now successfully reverted the beaks of chicken embryos into snouts more similar to ones seen in*Velociraptor*and*Archaeopteryx*than in birds. [See Images of the Chicken Embryos with Dinosaur-Like Snouts]..........."

http://news.yahoo.com/chicken-embryo...131834500.html

[Blake]

Evolution is fascinating, tbh.

[cantthinkofanything]

[Spur-Addict]

[cantthinkofanything]

[cantthinkofanything]

And BTW, it's a fully developed chicken embryo with a dinosaur snout. On topic.