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Chicken descended from dinosaurs?

WASHINGTON: Scientists are fleshing out the proof that today’s chicken is descended from the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur.

And, not a surprise, they confirmed a close relationship between mastodons and elephants.

Fossil studies have long suggested that modern birds descended from T. rex, based in similarities in their skeletons. Now, bits of protein obtained from connective tissues in a T. rex fossil shows a relationship to birds including chickens and ostriches, says a report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

“These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur,” Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in biology at Harvard University said in a statement.

Co-author John M. Asara of Harvard University reported last year that his team had been able to extract collagen from a T. rex and that it most closely resembled the collagen of chickens. With more data, Mr. Organ said, they would probably be able to place T. rex on the evolutionary tree between alligators and chickens and ostriches. “We also show that it groups better with birds than modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards,” Mr. Asara added.

The dinosaur protein was obtained a fossil found in 2003 by John Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in a barren fossil-rich stretch of land that spans Wyoming and Montana. Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences discovered soft-tissue preservation in the T. rex bone in 2005. — AP

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