- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension and on behalf of those folks, and our other cool organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. And tonight is the start of our 13th year so pretty happy about that. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce to you Mark Berres. He works here at the Biotechnology Center. He's gonna be talking about the evolution of the chicken. He was born in Centralia, Illinois, which is in the central part of Illinois.  [laughter]  But somewhere in his family, somebody was smart enough that by the time he was in high school, they moved up to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which is where he graduated from Regis High School, and then he went over to the dark side of the St. Croix to go to the University of Minnesota at St. Paul to get an undergraduate degree in genetics and cellular biology. Then he saw the light and came back to UW-Madison to get his PhD in zoology, a department which no longer exists, he just told me. Is that correct? - It's now the department of integrated biology. - Well, that's even better. Okay, he's been on this campus since 1995. You remember that. And he's been with the biotechnology center since 2016. This is something we've all been looking forward to. This is Mark's second Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Please join me in welcoming Mark Berres back to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.  [applause]  -  [Mark]  Thanks for stopping by tonight. As Tom indicated, we're going to talk about the evolution of chickens. This is really at least a similar foggy, in terms of our understanding of the origins of these wonderful birds. We're gonna discuss it at some detail tonight. It's a story that really spans more than 300 million years. And we're gonna cover it from the basic kind of origins of birds themselves, then we'll jump into a discussion of chickens as a very small group of birds. There's really only four species collectively termed jungle fowl, that are extant species. I want to talk a little bit about how they're integrated into an understanding of how our own human culture has originated, and in particular, dispersed across the globe. In fact, the evolution of chickens, is extraordinarily important for monitoring human dispersal. So a lot of anthropologists make use of domestic animals, not just the chicken, but the chicken is one of the more interesting examples of how humans actually bring their domesticated animals with them when they disperse to new areas. And lastly, I want to kind of talk about some of the unknown trajectories, in terms of evolution, that the chicken may actually be taking. It's a very big challenge, and we still don't know, precisely, the complete story of the evolution of the chicken. It's unlikely that we ever will. Unfortunately, it's difficult to predict where it's going as well, and I'd like to give you some perspective on that as well. So let's start about the first aspect of birds, for birds' sake. The evolutionary origins of birds, actually remain, to this day, very obscure and controversial. And part of the complexity arises from the fact that we need to account for not only birds themselves, but also features that they possess, features such as feathers, the ability to fly, and even physiology and behavior. So most of us are probably familiar with archaeopteryx one of the oldest known birds. It's about 145 to 150 million years ago. It actually has features so similar to modern birds that they're actually nearly indistinguishable. Both Charles Darwin on the left and his ardent supporter, Thomas Huxley on the right argued that archaeopteryx was a sideline of the avian evolution and really not a direct lineage leading to any modern-day birds. And indeed, the consensus is, that's probably true. Archaeopteryx is already a bird in the modern sense, at least 145 million years ago, equipped with flight adaptations, including his wonderful coat of feathers. Unfortunately as such, it can tell us very little about the ancestry of birds overall, particularly for the early stages in the evolution of feathers, birds, and flight. Since the discovery in geologic dating of Archaeopteryx, many other avian lineages, as you can see here, in fact, have been discovered but all but one are in fact extinct. Nevertheless, archaeopteryx is very important for exploring the relationships between modern birds and reptiles, especially with respect to skeletal structures and most importantly, the flight adaptations that accrued over the evolution of the bird and also the timing of events in the geological record. And so the fossil record is a great piece of evidence that allows us to place organisms and their lineages on a geological time scale and in fact, it permits us to see changes in diversity in morphological change over time. The importance of the availability that fossil evidence simply cannot be overly stressed. It provides a morphological, feature-based timeline of evolutionary change. But there's an insidious problem with the fossil record. Any sequence of events derived  from that fossil record, is merely one hypothesis. And the reason for that is that the fossil recor