The Rare and Majestic Red Junglefowl

“Q: Do we have a fossil history of chickens?”

The best part about chickens is that WE DON’T NEED ONE!

Let me introduce you to the red junglefowl.

Source: ARKive

Source: ARKive

“OH, YOU’RE A FUNNY ONE,” you might say. “PLEASE. THOSE ARE JUST THE BORING, REGULAR KIND OF CHICKENS, YOU JOKESTER” And you’d be so wrong! But also right, I guess? Anyway.

Modern chickens - subspecies Gallus gallus domesticus to the red’s Gallus gallus - are known to have been domesticated from the red junglefowl ~3000BP (before present), but the actual start of it probably began earlier (and possibly involved some hybridization shenanigans with the grey junglefowl - scandalous). The red junglefowl’s range is in Southeast Asia, and based off of DNA sequencing of fossil chicken bones from a multitude of human settlements around the world, there were likely several Asian domestication centers that slowly brought chickens around the world.

To go a bit further back, though, junglefowl are in the family Phasianidae (which I think is Latin for “good for shooting at I guess” - aka pheasants, partridges, peafowl, etc), a clade whose earliest fossil traces (Palaeortyx sp.) date from the Late Oligocene (~25MYA). The first fossil attributed to the Galliformes - “wildfowl” - order (Austinornis lentus) was from the Late Cretaceous(~70MYA). And, of course, the earliest birds evolved ~150MYA ago in the Late Jurassic.

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia