There have been many theories about this before but this is the first time an evidence has been unearthed to support the claims.

Thanks to tiny bits of protein extracted from a 68 million-year old Tyrannosaurus rex bone, our dear scientists now have the first ever genetic proof that the T. rex is actually a distant cousin of the modern chicken.

Even before all these findings, the researchers have long believed that chickens evolved from dinosaurs based on the study of dinosaurs' bones. It's just that they are lacking soft tissue evidence to confirm their take.

The first light glimmered when Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University reported that she has found soft tissues (with blood vessels and cells) in a T-Rex bone from Hell Creek Formation in Montana back in 2005.

To be able to extract the samples, Asara utilized a scientific technology known as mass spectrometry. He first purified the bone extract. The brown fragments were then broken down into peptide fragments, little bits of proteins, isolated into the amino acid sequences that make them up.

Harvard Medical School researcher John Asara said,

It's the first molecular evidence of this link between birds and dinosaurs. It was very tough to get anything. Based on all of the genomic information we have available today, it appears these sequences are closer to birds or chickens than anything else.

After interpreting the sequence, it turned out that it is mostly similar to the amino acid sequences of a chicken.