I get a steady trickle of messages from readers, and that’s great! I love hearing from you! This was a banner week - with a superb question about car-eating chickens and a torrent of messages about the dinosaur/chicken connection from Oklahoma middle-schoolers.

A Randy’s Chicken Blog Newsletter! How cool is that!?

Do you think of chickens as your feathered friends? Or do you consider them to be beady-eyed, sharp-beaked minions of evil? If the second sentence describes you, perhaps you have alektorophobia.

Not only are South American chickens very strange birds, but they’ve been in South America way too long.  When the Spanish first arrived in South America they noted the fact that there were already chickens there!  People were keeping domestic chickens!  Chickens, like cows, pigs, and sheep, are supposedly Old-World animals.  So what were they doing in South America before the Old-World explorers/conquerors got there?  How did they get there? Flying saucers, anybody? 

What innate weirdness dwells in the human psyche that compels us to domesticate an animal just so we can watch it fight?

After our pet chicken dies, then what? We are often loath to talk about it, because too many people just don’t get it. While nearly everybody understands the importance of our cats and dogs in our lives, to most folks, chickens are “just chickens.”

Was Tyrannosaurus rex really just a big chicken? Are chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus rex? Are chickens directly descended from T. rex? Are chickens dinosaurs? All your questions answered right here!