Chicken, with a side order of science
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 565 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the Christmas season, it is estimated that some 3.6 million families in Japan will tuck into KFC over Christmas (other fried chicken is available), which inspired the Unexpected Elements team to chew over all things chicken!
First, we discover that chicken may never have become domesticated if it wasn’t for rice farming. We also ponder whether the chicken or the egg came first. Next, we find out that humans are surprisingly smart at translating chicken chatter.
We are by Dr Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History, who reveals more about the links between dinosaurs and birds.
Plus, how Brazil became a poultry superpower, and what happens to chickens in tornadoes.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Camilla Mota and Godfred Boafo Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Sophie Ormiston, Ella Hubber and Robbie Wojciechowski
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | In 2019, we began investigating the disappearance of Dr. Ruzha Ignatva. |
| 0:14.0 | I believe we are a very special network. |
| 0:16.0 | A scammer who stole billions from investors around the world. |
| 0:21.4 | She's on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. |
| 0:24.5 | And now we have some unmissable updates. |
| 0:27.8 | She has money, and when you have money, you have power. |
| 0:30.6 | Join me, Jamie Bartlett, as the hunt for the missing crypto queen continues. |
| 0:35.5 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:42.0 | Thank you. This in Crypto Queen continues. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Have you ever wondered how much all the animals on Earth weighed? If you piled us onto a scale, |
| 0:49.3 | what the needle would tip at. It's not just an idle daydream, it's a useful metric that helps |
| 0:55.2 | psychologists to work out the impact an animal has on this planet. Yes, it may only take |
| 1:01.7 | one mosquito to ruin your night's sleep, but it does take about 400,000 of them to make up a |
| 1:07.3 | single kilo. Unsurprisingly, humans dominate when you compare species by biomass. |
| 1:14.4 | We make up a third of the mass of all mammals. |
| 1:18.4 | There's seven times more of us by weight than all the wild mammals on the planet. |
| 1:24.3 | That's 396 million tonnes of humans. And our livestock dominate too. We eat 74 billion |
| 1:33.5 | chickens a year and each broiler weighs just under three kilograms. So that's 222 billion kilograms |
| 1:40.9 | of chicken gracing this planet each year. |
| 1:46.7 | No wonder these birds outnumber us. |
| 1:51.2 | At any one time, there's three chickens for every one human. |
| 1:56.6 | You could argue a case that they are the dominant species on the planet. |
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