With about 25 billion of them strutting around the planet, chickens outnumber every other bird species by a long shot. That’s right, if you lined up all the flamingos, eagles, and penguins in the world, they still wouldn’t come close to the sheer crowd of chickens. The domestic chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus, is basically the world’s most successful bird species, descended from the red junglefowl of Asia. Along the way, the grey junglefowl pitched in genetically, making chickens the ultimate mash-up of fancy junglefowl DNA.

Chickens might seem like harmless backyard birds, but don’t let their clucking fool you. They are, in fact, the closest living relatives of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex. That’s right: when you watch a chicken pecking at corn, you’re basically staring down a miniature, feathery T. rex. Maybe not scary in your kitchen, but evolutionarily speaking, they are the tiny dinosaurs that survived by learning to mind their own business, grow feathers, and occasionally give humans eggs for breakfast.