Around 10,000 years ago, someone in Southeast Asia captured a bird that lived on the floor of the jungle.

Today, billions of descendants of that bird now live on six different continents and provide food for billions of people. Yet the birds which exist today are often very different from the ones which were domesticated

over 10 millennia ago.

And much of that change has occurred in just the last 70 years.

Learn more about the chicken and how they became one of the most common birds in the world

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The In 2005 a paleontologist working in Montana found the bones of a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Inside one of the bones he found something which was very rare.

He found a small piece of a blood vessel. Soft tissue is almost never found inside fossilized bones. After a chemical analysis of the is to the Tyrannosaurus rex is the chicken.

So if you ever want to tell your kids to eat their chicken or their eggs,

just tell them it's a Tyrannosaurus rex.

It isn't totally true, but it also isn't totally false either.

The domesticated chicken that we know originated in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Most domesticated animals were domesticated around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, and the chicken is no exception.

The only difference between chicken and cattle

is that the ancient ancestor of the chicken actually still exists today.

The chicken come from four different species of wild jungle fowl which are native to Southeast Asia.

One DNA study claimed that the modern chicken descended from a species located in the mountains of southwest China, northern Thailand, and Northeast Myanmar.

These may have then interbred with other wild species located in India and China.

The scientific name for the wild version of the jungle fowl is Galus, Galus.

And the domesticated animal that we know as the chicken is Galus, Galus domesticus.

Given its starting point in Southeast Asia, the chicken was primed to spread in several different directions.

There's still some doubt in the archaeological record as to when chickens arrived where,

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