At first, scientists have created experimental chickens with their feet like dinosaurs by manipulating their genes, highlighting the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
Dinosaurs – the ancestors of birds – fibula, one of the two long bones of the leg, that is tube-shaped and reaches all the way to the ankle.
However, in the evolution of dinosaurs to birds, which lost its lower end, and no longer connected with the ankle, being shorter than the other leg bone, the tibia. The scientists found that bird embryos develop first one, the tubular fibula as a dinosaur.
Then, it becomes shorter than the tibia and acquires its adult shape similar chips. Brazilian researcher Joao Botelho, who works in the laboratory of Alejandro Vargas of the University of Chile, studied the mechanisms behind this transformation.
