Chickens Help Scientists Study Dinosaur Death Pose

To address a long-standing mystery in paleontology, scientists went to the grocery store. Many dinosaur fossils appear in the same pose, not so much "terrible lizard" as "terrible limbo accident." Their tails are stretched out and their necks thrown back grotesquely. But it's not clear why this is. Researchers from the University of Calgary in Canada got a fresh take on the puzzle—or, at least, a recently killed and frozen take—by using dead chickens. "Chickens are living dinosaurs, as are all birds," says biologist Anthony Russell. Evolutionarily speaking, a chicken is closer to an extinct dinosaur than a crocodile is. So Russell and his student Adam Bentley, an undergraduate at the time, purchased 15 frozen whole chickens from a local grocery store. After thawing out the birds, the researchers put them to work. Chickens naturally hold their necks in an S shape. Russell and Bentley first laid the birds on ...