Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 18 September 2015

The chicken that walks like a dinosaur

"Dr Rodrigo Vasquez, from the University of Chile, received the biology Ig Nobel for the crucial observation that if you raise a chicken with a weighted, artificial tail stuck to its backside, it will walk like a dinosaur."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34278595

2 comments:

  1. "Science" has lost it's way. So many things wrong. Since when does anyone know how a dinosaur walked? Trying to prove evolution is the same as trying to push a square peg through a round whole. There is no mechanism for evolution so you cannot get written directives that are not there.

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  2. Firstly, this is the *Ig*Nobels. They're not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

    Secondly, if you read the article it says :
    "As comical as they sound, these experiments offer a rare chance to explore how extinct species like Tyrannosaurus rex might have moved. It is impossible to know for sure, of course, but palaeontologists had made some educated guesses - which are now closely matched by the gait of these stick-tailed chickens."
    So of course no-one knows for certain exactly how dinosaurs really walked, but a chicken with a tail stuck on it apparently walks in a similar way to models predicting how they might have walked.

    Thirdly, I'm not going to debate evolution with you.

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