T. rex confirmed as great granddaddy of all birds 19:00 24 April 2008 NewScientist.com news service Ewen Callaway John Asara, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Mary Schweitzer, North Carolina State University Thomas Holtz, University of Maryland Tyrannosaurus rex, meet the chicken – your third cousin more than 100 million years removed. A new family tree based on protein sequences recovered from dinosaur fossils firms up the dinosaur's avian lineage. "Palaeontologists have known this overall connection. We have now confirmed it with molecular data," says John Asara, a biochemist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led the study....