Imagine that the world ended today in a mass extinction event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. If an alien paleontologist were to visit our planet millions of years from now, what kind of fossils do you think they’d find? I can tell you right now that the first bones they’ll probably find are chicken bones. Ubiquitous birdsThere are at least 26 billion chickens in the world right now, more than double the number from 1990. That’s more than any other vertebrate and at least one order of magnitude greater than any other bird. This figure counts just the number of l…
