In 2004, biologist Jose Iriarte-Diaz conducted a legendary research project in Chile. Iriarte-Diaz wanted to study how dinosaurs moved, but their extinction some 66 million years earlier hampered his research. The closest he could come was to study how birds walk.
And there lay a new problem. Millions of years of evolution had so changed the anatomy of these surviving descendants of the dinosaur species of old that how they walk would be very different from how dinosaurs walked.
Take today's chicken for example. Here, evolution has conspired to significantly change the body of the species. Unlike their theropod ancestors, chickens lack long tails, which significantly changes their mass and center of gravity, which would have a big impact on how they move.
But then, Iriarte-Diaz hit on a genius idea. What if he could create a prosthetic tail for chickens, then train them to walk with it. He could then compare how both regular chickens and the prosthetic tail-wearing chickens move, where he hypothesized the prosthetic tail-wearing chickens would move like dinosaurs would have. Here's how a press release from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he finally published his research in 2014, described his experiment:
Studying a group of 12 domestic chickens, Iriarte-Diaz used modeling clay to attach a tail — a wooden stick — to the chickens two days after hatching. He changed the tail every five days as the chickens grew, then compared their movements to his control subjects, chickens without tails.
His research suggests that dinosaurs walked more like humans, with a vertical stance and most of the movement in the hips. Chickens without the experimental tails showed more horizontal movements, with the knees doing most of the work.
He also recorded video of the dinosaur tail-wearing chickens and uploaded them to YouTube:
In 2015, Iriarte-Díaz' and his colleagues' work captured the imagination of the Ig Nobel Prize committee, which awarded them the Ig Nobel Biology Prize for their published research.
But the story doesn't end there.
Flash forward to 2026. Allen Pan is a Science and Engineering YouTuber who has drawn popular attention for various devices he's created over the years. He wondered if it would be possible to build an articulated tail prosthetic device for a chicken that might be more realistically dinosaur-like than the static ones Iriarte-Diaz crafted for his biomechanical research. The next video presents Pan's development of the improved prosthetic dinosaur tail and the results from tests conducted with adult chickens:
Pan's 3D-printed articulating dinosaur tail resulted in a chicken almost immediately adopting the kind of dinosaur-locomotion methods it took the chickens that Iriarte-Díaz' and his colleagues' raised and extensively trained from hatched egg to adult bird to produce. It's not just a replication of the Iriarte-Díaz' dinosaur tail prosthetic, but a genuine improvement beyond it utilizing multiple levels of innovations.
In both cases, the dinosaur tail prosthetics represent a fantastic example of outside-the-box thinking.
Labels: technology
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