By disrupting a key gene, scientists made chicken feathers more dinosaur-like — but the results didn’t last.
In a new study, researchers inhibited a gene during embryonic development to make chicken feathers more primitive, like the kind of simple tube-shaped proto-feathers that likely first emerged in the ancestors of dinosaurs in the Early Triassic 250 million years ago.
They succeeded — but only temporarily. The chickens showed delayed feather development and naked spots at hatching, but within a few weeks, their plumage looked like any other fowl’s.
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