A few years ago, in his advisor’s lab at Harvard University, Bhart-Anjan Bhullar carefully removed another batch of specimens from their shells, placed them into containers with preservatives, and packed them up.
The specimens were chicken embryos, but from what Bhullar could see, they didn’t appear to have beaks—they had something that looked more like a dinosaur’s snout.
He’d have to wait for the final pictures to be sure. The specimens were on their way to get a CT scan. (Computerized tomography, or CT, provides highly detailed X-ray images.)
Bhullar is a paleontologist. He and his team study how vertebrates (organisms with backbones) have evolved over time to the animals we see today. He’s now a professor at Yale University, but he earned his PhD at Harvard, where he spent…
