Scientists discover why the closest living relative to the T-Rex might actually be a chicken

Since dinosaurs died out millions of years ago it can be hard to study them, but one thing we do know is that their closest living relative might surprise you.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the closest animal that we have to dinosaurs is some form of reptile but that wouldn’t be strictly true.

In fact, when many people think of dinosaurs, they tend to think of movies rather than paleontology.

So, if I say T-Rex you immediately go to scenes straight out of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park franchise rather than the latest discoveries and research into the topic.

Unfortunately, scientists don’t really think dinosaurs looked like scaley and dark-colored reptiles, in fact their closest relatives are actually birds, research has suggested.

The T-Rex has long been depicted looking reptilian in popular media (Getty Stock Image)

This isn’t a new discovery in the scientific community either.

How did the study work?

Back in 2008, scientists performed a molecular analysis of a shred of 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein and compared it to a variety of proteins belonging to a whole host of different animals.

Getting the protein of dinosaurs is actually quite difficult considering they died quite a few million years ago but modern researchers were lucky enough to discover some unfossilized material inside a T. rex bone.

From this they were able to retrieve molecules of collagen, a structural protein that appears in slightly different forms in many animals.

They compared the dinosaur version with 21 living animals, including humans, chimps, mice, chickens, ostriches, alligators, and salmon.

While the proteins from alligators were relatively close, the best matches came from ostriches and chickens.

Chickens and ostriches are only distantly related to one another so the revelation doesn’t actually do much in narrowing down what kind of birds might be the closest relatives of the famous carnivore.

You are basically eating great descendant of the T-rex (Getty Stock Image)

What have the scientists said?

At the time, the co-author of the study, postdoctoral researcher in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, Chris Organ, said more research would be needed to narrow down the evolutionary connection between chickens, ostriches, alligators and dinosaurs.

He said: “From T. rex, we were able to establish these relationships with a relatively high degree of support. With more data, we’d likely see the T. rex branch on the phylogenetic tree between alligators and chickens and ostriches, though we can’t resolve this position with currently available data.”