Did Dinosaurs Taste like Chicken?

According to data released on Friday by researchers from North Carolina State University, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard Medical Center, dinosaurs may be closely related to... the chicken. Using a highly sophisticated form of protein analysis, scientists were able to analyze a 68 million year-old dinosaur bone, and were stunned to find that the chicken may be the closest living relative to the giant dinosaurs.

The results, which were released in Friday's issue of "Science," were "terrifically interesting," according to Eddy Rubin, an expert in ancient DNA. "It really does say that biological molecules survive way longer than anyone thought."

Mary H. Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University (Raleigh), who led the study, said "this interplay between the fossil record and the molecular record will be more and more useful for understanding the evolution of life on this planet."

According to research, the fragile DNA strand useful for identifying traits and species tends to break down rather quickly in geological terms, and is almost never recognizable in remains more than 10,000 years old. Proteins, on the other hand, are surprisingly more stable.

The research could end up being a useful tool in determining relationship between extinct species. Rather than use the tools available to scientists now, which oftentimes amount to analyzing bone size and structure, protein analysis could someday make that process extinct.

But there is a catch. As in carbon dating, a portion of the substance to be analyzed must be destroyed.

"Most curators of paleontology don't like me," Schweitzer said. "They like to keep their bones intact, and they don't like me to come in and dissolve them away."

According to John Horner, of Montana State University, this discovery - not just the process - is huge. "It changes the idea that birds and dinosaurs are related from a hypothesis to a theory." In scientific terms, a hypothesis is something scientists believe could be true, while a theory is something which had been proved possible by evidence gained through testing.