Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (23 page)

The bird's link with the Vatican may even have more esoteric roots. Today's Saint Peter's Basilica sits on the site of a temple to Cybele, the great mother goddess of Anatolia, who became popular in Rome as Christianity began to take root. Unlike Janus or Peter, she held the keys to the underworld rather than heaven. Her priests were castrated men called Galli, a reference either to the Roman word for
rooster
, an ancient king, a river in Anatolia, or some combination of those. “The erotic association of ‘rooster-cock-phallus,' already in currency, served as an inside joke among the Galli and was later used by Roman citizens to ridicule them,” one scholar notes.

The poet Juvenal remarked that Galli were “capon'd late,” that is, had their testicles removed as was done with some roosters. The gender­-bending Galli dressed and behaved like women, and the shrine remained venerated well into the fourth century AD, possibly after construction of old Saint Peter's Basilica by the Roman emperor Constantine I. Near both the original basilica and the Cybele temple stood the great obelisk brought to Rome from Egypt's Heliopolis and rededicated to the sun god by the Roman emperor Caligula in 37 AD, three decades before Peter was crucified in its shadow.

By the late sixth century, Pope Gregory I decreed that the rooster's tie to St. Peter made it Christianity's most suitable emblem. (The name Gregory comes from the Greek word for
vigilant
and may have been related to the bird.) “The Cock is like the Souls of the Just, waiting for the dawn, after the darkness of the world's night,” wrote the English monk and scholar Bede a few decades later. By the ninth century, a huge gilded rooster shone from the bell tower of old Saint Peter's Basilica, calling for the faithful to awake. Clergy were called
“Cocks of the Almighty.” By the tenth century, by papal decree, every church in Christendom was ordered to place a rooster on its highest point.

In 1102, at the end of the First Crusade, Europeans in Jerusalem rebuilt a destroyed fifth-century AD Byzantine shrine where tradition says Peter's betrayal took place—the house of the priest Caiaphas—and named it the Gallicantu, or the cock's crow. Inside the building, reconstructed in the 1930s, is a painting of Jesus and Peter standing on either side of a slender column surmounted by a rooster. In the courtyard outside is a statue commemorating the gospel scene, with a rooster standing high above on a stone column that eerily resembles the images on ancient Babylonian seals and Greek vases.

By the time of the First Crusade, the rooster was falling out of favor among the clergy, which increasingly saw it as licentious, subject to the temptation of lust. Yet the bird remained popular with common people as a protector from evil. Amulets and incantations invoking the bird remained in use despite church bans on them. Magical amulets displaying fierce creatures with snake legs and a cock's head date back to Greco-Roman times, and were popular among ancient Jews and Persians as well as medieval Christians. The rooster's long history as a power animal could not be quickly erased.

In the fourteenth century, swearing often substituted
God
or
Christ
for
cock
—Chaucer's characters spoke of “cock's bones.” Alchemists, those protochemists, sought a powerful stone said to reside inside a rooster's head that “will cause you to obtain whatever thing”—from an eloquent tongue to a woman's ability to please her husband sexually. They often used the rooster as a symbol of the sun and the masculine principle, and the hen for the moon and the feminine. Observing chickens, they began to assert that the female was more than just fertile ground for the life force of the male seed, an idea considered doctrine since Aristotle. This radical notion, which went against church teaching, helped lay the foundation for the modern science of embryology.

A last echo of the cock's Christian role is heard in Shakespeare's
Hamlet
, written around 1600. In the Christmas season, “the bird of
dawning singeth all night long,” says a sentry in the Danish castle of Elsinore. “And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad; the nights are wholesome.” A decade later in the town of Pagani, south of Rome, a church was dedicated to the Madonna of the Chickens after several hens pecked on a wooden icon of the Virgin and miraculous cures ensued. But the Reformation knocked the teetering rooster off its pedestal. By the seventeenth century, witches were accused of using the bird as a substitute for the host at illicit black masses. In a dramatic reversal, the animal was seen as a harbinger of darkness and a tool of Satan, often pictured in league with the devil or as the devil itself. Protestant artists working on murals in the inner court of the city hall in Basel, Switzerland, painted a vivid scene of hell, with Satan as a human-sized rooster torturing evildoers, including a pope and a nun.

“Within the Cock, vile incest doth appeare,” warned the English curate Henry Peacham in 1612, as well as cautioning against sodomy, witchcraft, and murder. The cock's comb that once inspired the serrated crown of ancient Persian kings was instead remade as a jester's silly hat that went by the same name. In
The Taming of the Shrew
, written after 1590, Shakespeare uses this change for a spirited and ribald exchange. “What is your crest?” Kate demands of her would-be wooer Petruchio, asking facetiously about his family's heraldic display. “A coxcomb?” But Petruchio is quick with a snappy comeback: “A combless cock, so Kate will be my hen.” A comb could also be interpreted as the foreskin of an uncircumcised penis. Some bard scholars believe Petruchio is implying his foreskin isn't showing because he has an erection in the presence of his prospective bride.

At the dawn of the modern era in the West, the once proud and sacred bird remained linked to sex, but increasingly as an emblem of lust and ridicule. In the seventeenth century, a deep strain of sexual puritanism—both Protestant and Catholic—spread across Europe and into the Americas. When old Saint Peter's was demolished—exposing remants of the Cybele shrine—the bronze cock that for a millennium preened from its bell tower was relegated to the Vatican treasury, where it remains today. The new basilica was consecrated
in 1626, with Caligula's obelisk placed at the center of Saint Peter's Square. Thirty years later, citing “superstitions among the people,” Pope Alexander VII banned an ancient ritual in which a new pope received a bronze cock that sat atop a porphyry column at Rome's Saint John Lateran, said to be the very one from which the cock crowed Peter's denial in Jerusalem.

By this time, clock makers were at work perfecting mechanical alarm clocks. Soon the rooster's call would be more nuisance than blessing. Despised for its ungodly ways on both sides of the religious divide in the West, the cockless cock was now neither royal nor sacred. Even so, the male chicken could not be completely eradicated from public life, even in New England. The Puritan preacher Cotton Mather dedicated a Boston church in 1721 that came to be known as “the Church of the Holy Rooster.” The five-foot-five-inch, 172-pound gilded weathercock became the city's preeminent landmark for sailors. By the time it blew down during a storm in the late nineteenth century, it had helped guide clipper ships from China carrying exotic fowl into Boston harbor.

Chicken
is synonymous with cowardice, a twentieth-century idea that would bewilder the ancients, puzzle our more recent ancestors, and annoy the French. The rooster remains, after all, the national emblem of France. It also has a longer history than the donkey as a U.S. Democratic Party mascot. Groups as diverse as the Communist Party of Venezuela (which uses a design drawn by Pablo Picasso), Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union, and Berlin's Protestant student union use it as their symbol. In our modern world of ­factory-farmed birds, however, the cock's martial abilities are no longer needed, appreciated, or desired. Yet the bird's natural fierceness has formidable roots.

In 2007, a scientific team extracted a protein from a dinosaur that lived 68 million years ago and found it to be identical to one that exists in the chicken. This was not just any dinosaur but the largest two-legged carnivore of all. “Study:
Tyrannosaurus Rex
Basically a
Big Chicken,” read one headline. Paleontologists in the past decade have accepted the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but the protein discovery marked the first time that biologists had genetic proof of the connection.

The discovery began in the rugged badlands of northeastern Montana. Jack Horner, a largely self-taught Montana paleontologist, was leading a team sampling the rich fossil fields in the area. Under tons of debris and rock they recovered a remarkably intact
T. rex
, including a three-foot-long femur. The fossilized remains were encased in protective plaster, and the one-ton weight proved too heavy to lift by helicopter, so the team sawed it in half. In the process, the femur broke and shed a few pieces. In 2003, Horner shipped these bits to his former student Mary Schweitzer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who used molecular biology to analyze dinosaur remains. Unlike bone, tissue quickly degrades, so she didn't anticipate finding any in the sample.

Schweitzer noted the femur belonged to a pregnant female, since there was a particular kind of tissue within the bone made during ovulation to conserve calcium. It was the first time anyone had found unimpeachable evidence of a dinosaur's sex. The following year, she asked one of her assistants to soak a fragment in a weak acid. Since fossils typically are mostly rock that dissolves quickly in such a solution, the procedure can destroy a sample, but the assistant discovered a rubbery substance left behind after a long soaking. When other fragments were subjected to identical treatment, the same material was left behind. The two researchers could even make out what looked like blood vessels. Schweitzer had found the first dinosaur tissue. Unlike
Jurassic Park
's scenario of cloning dinosaurs based on blood found in a mosquito trapped in amber, there was no chance of recovering DNA from the samples, but the tissue held other secrets.

A Harvard University chemist named John Asara had worked with Schweitzer a few years before, identifying the proteins from a three-hundred-thousand-year-old mammoth bone, although he specialized in sequencing proteins in human tumors. Proteins are made up of amino-acid chains too tiny to be imaged by a typical lab
microscope, but Asara knew how to add antibodies that would bind to the proteins and make them visible.

Schweitzer sent Asara via FedEx a little vial of brown powder wrapped in dry ice, the ground-up soft tissue from the femur fragment. He carefully removed the brownish contaminants in the powder. “You don't want to inject anything brown into a three-­hundred-thousand-dollar machine,” he explains when I visit him in his Harvard lab in a Boston high-rise. The mass spectrometer is a boxy plastic device the size of a hotel-room refrigerator that can measure the tiny masses and concentrations of molecules and atoms.

Asara first added an enzyme to break up any proteins into more manageable molecules called peptides. The mass spectrometer then spit out nearly fifty thousand spectra detailing the composition of the sample. There is no database on dinosaur DNA sequences, so Asara had to make theoretical models of protein sequences that
might
have existed 68 million years ago, based on earlier mastodon work. He also had the sequence of the chicken that had been published in 2004. “We have a more comprehensive database for chickens than any other bird,” he says.

He pinpointed a half-dozen protein lines in the
T. rex
that were identical matches to the chicken. Not only had he and Schweitzer isolated 68-million-year-old soft tissue, more than twenty times older than any yet found, they also asserted that they had identified the world's oldest proteins and found them identical to those in the modern chicken. Their 2007 paper in
Science
clinched the argument for placing birds with dinosaurs in the evolutionary tree, though skeptical colleagues tried to rebut the claim. Two years later, Schweitzer and Asara found eight sequences of chickenlike proteins in an 80-million-year-old bone of a hadrosaur, vindicating their technique.

Reverse evolution can provide more understanding of the link between dinosaurs and modern birds like the chicken. Horner, the Montana paleontologist, proposes creating what he calls a chickenosaurus by peeling back the genetic layers of the chicken to expose the monster within. The vanishing embryonic chicken penis is an example of how evolution is revealed in embryo development. Fetal
chickens also briefly begin to grow a dinosaur-like three-fingered claw and a long tail that then disappears. In theory, if molecular biologists could prevent the gene that gets rid of the tail from turning on, then a hybrid chicken-dinosaur could result. Genes from other species could also be added to encourage dinosaur-like traits and repress chicken ones.