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Blobrana


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RE: Chickens
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A Sri Lanka hen has given birth to a chick without an egg, in a new twist on the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.
Instead of passing out of the hen's body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen.
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Blobrana


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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have peered deep into the eye of the chicken and found a masterpiece of biological design. Scientists mapped five types of light receptors in the chicken's eye. They discovered the receptors were laid out in interwoven mosaics that maximized the chickens ability to see many colours in any given part of the retina, the light-sensing structure at the back of the eye.
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Blobrana


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40 years ago, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wiltschko was the first to prove that migrating robins use the Earths magnetic field to direct themselves during migration. Their magnetic sensor showed them the course of the field lines of the Earths magnetic field.
This produces an inclination compass that reacts to the inclination of the Earths magnetic field to the surface of the Earth, thus distinguishing between pole-wards (the side on which the field lines incline downwards) and equator-wards (the side on which they incline upwards). The inbuilt compass is additionally finely tuned to the field strength of the Earths local magnetic field, but can also be flexibly adapted to other field strengths that the birds encounter in the course of migration. Since that time a compass of this kind has been found in more than 20 species of birds, the majority of them being those songbirds that undertake annual migration. An international working group under the direction of Wolfgang und Roswitha Wiltschko of Frankfurt University has now succeeded in demonstrating the presence of a magnetic sense of direction in domestic chickens as well.

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Blobrana


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Polynesians visited South America
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A chicken bone found in Chile provides solid evidence to settle a debate over whether Polynesians travelling on rafts visited South America thousands of years ago -- or vice versa, researchers said Monday.
The DNA in the bone carries a rare mutation that links it to chickens in Tonga and Samoa, and radiocarbon dating shows it is around 600 years old -- meaning it predates the arrival of Spanish conquerors in South America.

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Blobrana


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Chickens
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Why did the chicken cross the ocean? To get to America before Columbus - and from the other direction - according to a new report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Many scholars had thought chickens arrived in the New World with the early Spanish or Portuguese explorers around the year 1500.
When Juan Pizarro arrived at the Inca empire in 1532, however, he found chickens already being used there, raising the possibility they had been around for some time.
And now, researchers led by Alice Storey at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, report finding evidence that may ruffle some scholarly feathers. They found chicken bones of Polynesian origin at a site in what is now Chile.
Radiocarbon dating of chicken bones at the site on the Arauco Peninsula in south central Chile indicated a range of A.D. 1321 to 1407, well before the Spanish arrival in the Americas.
The researchers were able to obtain DNA from some of the bones of these early birds, and found they were identical to ancient chicken bones previously found in Tonga and Samoa.
Chicken had been used in the Pacific for at least 3,000 years, spreading eastward across the region as Polynesians gradually populated the islands.
The DNA from these chickens also shared some unique sequences with modern Araucana chickens from South America and some current chicken types in Hawaii and Southeast Asia, the researchers found.

Source PNAS

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