From ancient empires to modern economics, veteran journalist Andrew Lawler delivers a sweeping history of the animal that has been most crucial to the spread of civilization across the globethe chicken.Queen Victoria was obsessed with it. Socrates last words were about it. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur made their scientific breakthroughs using it. Catholic popes, African shamans, Chinese philosophers, and Muslim mystics praised it. Throughout the history of civilization, humans have embraced it in every form imaginableas a messenger of the gods, powerful sex symbol, gambling aid, emblem of resurrection, all-purpose medicine, handy research tool, inspiration for bravery, epitome of evil, and, of course, as the star of the worlds most famous joke. In Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, science writer Andrew Lawler takes us on an adventure from prehistory to the modern era with a fascinating account of the partnership between human and chicken (the most successful of all cross-species relationships). Beginning with the recent discovery in Montana that the chickens unlikely ancestor is T. rex, this book builds on Lawlers popular Smithsonian cover article, How the Chicken Conquered the World to track the chicken from its original domestication in the jungles of Southeast Asia some 10,000 years ago to postwar America, where it became the most engineered of animals, to the uncertain future of what is now humanitys single most important source of protein. In a masterful combination of historical sleuthing and journalistic exploration on four continents, Lawler reframes the way we feel and think about our most important animal partnerand, by extension, all domesticated animals, and even nature itself. Lawlers narrative reveals the secrets behind the chickens transformation from a shy jungle bird into an animal of astonishing versatility, capable of serving our species changing needs. For no other siren has called humans to rise, shine, and prosper quite like the roosters cry: cock-a-doodle-doo!