We all know that birds and dinosaurs are related, but how much can we know about dinosaurs from the study of modern birds? From The Business Insider:
Studying dinosaur bones and physiology can only teach us so much about how dinosaurs actually walked the Earth. Because dinosaurs called theropods are related to modern birds, a few researchers thought they could study how they walk using chickens.
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To make chickens change their gait, the researchers added a tail, which looks surprisingly like a toilet plunger, to their butts. This changed their center of gravity, and made them walk differently.
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The finding?
"Our results support the hypothesis that gradual changes in the location of the centre of mass resulted in more crouched hindlimb postures and a shift from hip-driven to knee-driven limb movements through theropod evolution," the researchers write in the study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
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