This robot chicken shows how T. rex might have walked

It may not be quite as geeky as that show on Adult Swim, but this robot chicken is just as awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve officially reached the point where we’re a step above imagining how a feathered Tyrannosaurus rex walks:

Using prosthetic tails made out of 7mm-long wooden sticks planted on modelling clay bases, researchers from the University of Chile were able to examine the walking patterns and behavior of chickens with “dinosaur tails.”

 

 

 

The research team, led by Bruno Grossi, was inspired by the now-widely accepted notion that birds evolved directly from the two-legged theropod dinosaurs that ruled the Earth millions of years ago.

 

“Birds have inherited numerous locomotory traits from their dinosaur ancestors, including bipedalism, fully erect posture, and parasagittal hindlimb movement, which are not shared with the other extant group of archosaurs, the crocodilians,” wrote the researchers in their paper, which was recently published in the online journal PLOS ONE.

 

“Therefore, it is appealing to think of birds as a model system to gain insights into aspects of non-avian dinosaur biology that are hard to study directly from fossil material, such as the relationship between limb morphology, posture, and locomotion.”

 

Chicken run

 

The researchers raised a dozen domestic chickens to sexual maturity, then divided them into three groups of four members each. The control group was basically left alone, free to walk undisturbed, in the typical manner that chickens do.

 

The experimental group, on the other hand, was fitted with the prosthetic tails, which were designed to be 15% of each chicken’s total mass – a fraction that the researchers believe accurately represents “the tail/body mass proportion for smaller theropod dinosaurs.”

 

The third group, the control-weight group, was comprised of chickens that each had a piece of lead attached as close to their center of mass as possible. Each lead piece had the same weight as the prosthetic tails. This was done in order to study the changes in posture and motion that an increase in the chickens’ weight would bring about in the absence of a tail.

 

According to the researchers’ findings, chickens raised with the prosthetic tails had more vertically-oriented femurs when standing in place (a range of motion three times greater than that of chickens in the control group). However, the control group and the control-weight group displayed the same posture when standing.

 

Furthermore, the experimental subjects showed a more hip-driven way of walking, similar to crocodiles, mammals, and two-legged non-avian dinosaurs (at least, theoretically).

 

The team believes that their findings may prove to be instrumental in exploring how the prehistoric theropods may have walked the planet, literally.

 

Of course, the answer to the question of how we can bring the dinosaurs back is perhaps a tail for another day.

Meanwhile, here's some more Robot Chicken: