You may see it every day, but the chicken is a fascinating animal. To begin with, it is the most numerous bird on the planet: there are tens of billions of them. And it descends from the dinosaurs: it is a distant relative of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex. Its ancestor is a wild bird of the forests of Southeast Asia, the red junglefowl, domesticated thousands of years ago. Chickens are very communicative: they use more than twenty different sounds, and even warn with different calls depending on whether the danger comes from the sky or from the ground. The mother talks to her chicks while they are still inside the egg, and they answer her. And in the henhouse there is a very strict order: who eats first, who sleeps on the best perch… That is where the expression “pecking order” comes from. A whole society with feathers.