chickens

A few years ago Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, then a Ph.D. student in Arhat Abzhanov’s lab at Harvard, did something pretty incredible: He took an embryonic chicken and inhibited a couple of genes during its development. It was a tiny adjustment that produced a pretty amazing result: “Those chickens that were altered in that way, they grew up to have a snout that looked like a dinosaur snout,” he tells Inverse. Bhullar’s research exists at the strange intersection of molecular biology and paleontology. When he’s not teaching at Yale, he’s investigating how major distinguishing features of animal groups came about — in … Read more